


Odds Are (We're Gonna Be All Right Tonight)

by luninosity



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America (Movies) RPF, Marvel Cinematic Universe RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anxiety Attacks, Captain America References, Coffee Shops, Comfort, Dom/sub Play, Dom/sub Undertones, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Falling In Love, First Kiss, First Meetings, Fluff and Angst, Hand Jobs, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, I Love You, Love Confessions, M/M, Recovery, References to Illness, Sex, Sexual Content, Sick Sebastian, Storms, True Love, Writers, mention of past self-harm, sebastian unintentionally taking too many painkillers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-26 10:01:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3846724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Chris Evans reads a book, Sebastian Stan holds Chris’s hand, stories matter, and Martians are important.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. struck by lightning

**Author's Note:**

> Title and chapter titles from the Barenaked Ladies song "Odds Are," this time.
> 
> Art soon to come! Written for the [Evanstan Big Bang 2015](http://evanstanbang.tumblr.com/) challenge.
> 
> Many thanks and much love to [ninemoons42](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42) for reading it over and reassuring me when I panicked about plot points. *hugs*

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Chris Evans reads a book.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, Sebastian's bestselling books are the gay romance version of the Captain America films. :-)

Chris stares at the blank unlined rugged-yet-expensive notebook page. It stares back. Mocking him with empty space.  
  
_The sound of a waterfall—_  
  
No.  
  
_The stillness makes me think about peace and getting a new tattoo, maybe something abstract, like a spiral of—_  
  
No.  
  
_I miss my dog._  
  
No, no, no. Rain plops onto the tent-flaps above him, cheerfully unsympathetic. Chris collapses into a heap of sleeping-bag woe and groans. No one hears him except the tent and the rain. No one cares.  
  
Which of course had been precisely the point. He flops over onto his back. Heaves a pathetic sigh. Counts raindrops as they drum a heartbeat onto waterproof fabric.   
  
At least he’s warm and dry. Some people probably aren’t. He can be grateful for that. He can be grateful for a lot of things, including the success of his first book, that weird and rambling semi-autobiographical illustrated tale of wildernesses and self-discovery, of meditation and Eckhart Tolle philosophy, of the need to quiet his brain and get metaphorically and literally naked for a while and exhale. He’d won awards and critical favor, if not precisely earthshattering sales figures. Great American novel. Best new writer. Heir to Twain and Kerouac. Life on the road, with pen in hand, doing his own little slice-of-life sketches of words and drawings.  
  
He _can_ be grateful for that, except he isn’t grateful for that, because he’s a terrible person with a terrible brain and he can’t not think about the next book he hasn’t managed to write over three years later, the follow-up that’s never materialized, the eyes waiting for him to be brilliant again, and every time he opens up his notebook he can’t breathe, paralyzed by possibilities, frozen by expectation sharp as icicles—  
  
Maybe he should write that down. Maybe it’s a good simile. Maybe it’s not. No clue. Not anymore.  
  
He’s out here in the wilds of New England attempting to recapture the magic. This isn’t working. Not all the chopping firewood and wearing of flannel and growing out his beard and making coffee from acorns, none of that, has thus far given him a single word.  
  
The rain increases. Wind howls. The weather’s got a perverse sense of humor, Chris decides, lying on his back and staring at navy-blue tent-billows. Once-famous washed-up writer lost in deluge. Second Great Flood claims life of one-hit literary wonder. He was stupid enough to go camping, the story’ll read, in a fairytale-dense forest in the middle of nowhere despite his brother’s recommendations, though to be fair Scott would consider anyplace without a whirlpool bathtub to be the heights of hardship, so never mind that one. He’s got a cellphone, but the reception’s spotty at best; he’s told people where he’ll be and for how long, of course, but he’d wanted to go unplugged for a few days, only himself and the elements.  
  
The elements. Water. Endless water.  
  
_The storm poured down, and I thought I might drown under the weight—_  
  
No. Too noir. Too depressing. Damn.  
  
But it _is_ funny, the storm’s not wrong about that. Chris sighs again and sits up, unearthing a couple of brand-new shiny paperbacks. He’s naturally a happy person; anxious, yeah, but happy, and he knows he is, knows that given time and space his brain’ll shake itself back into equilibrium. So: distractions, then. Something weightless, preposterous, hilarious, and nothing at all like the contemplative descriptive prose he’s trying to find. Something he’ll never think twice about. Sounds like a plan.  
  
He’d bought several lurid novels off the convenience-store rack at the nearest rest stop for just this purpose. He flips through them. Flashy artwork, designed to catch a casual roving eye. Period romance and flowing dresses. Vampires with sparkly attributes. Spies and guns and dramatic masculine action. Science fiction.  
  
He pauses, hand resting on that cover.  
  
Science fiction. He knows this one. Not that he’s read it, but everyone in just about the entire _world_ knows this one by now. He’d been kind of avoiding it for precisely that reason: not that Chris’s a literary snob, of course not, people love what they love and that’s great, he’s only…not quite ever bothered to pick it up. Not until now.  
  
The critics and the literary establishment at large had mostly ignored this first novel and the two sequels; but then that had a fair amount to do, Chris had thought at the time, with the massive pop-culture adoration and commercial triumph of the trilogy, and also the subject matter. Superheroes and supersoldiers and time travel. Gay romance saving the day across centuries. Soap-opera melodrama and codependency on display, plus a plot that—judging from the improbable cover—seems to involve half-naked men and sniper rifles.  
  
He eyes that cover. Might be just what he needs. Besides, his sense of fairness has woken up to protest: he _is_ being a snob, and he should damn well give the thing a decent try.  
  
The author’s name is Sebastian Stan. Chris knows this because it’s splashed across the top half of the page in boisterous silver. This sounds like a made-up pen-name if he’s ever heard one. Who has two first names, anyway?   
  
He flips to the about-the-author page. The photo’s in grey hues, no color, though this effort fails to contain the distressing cuteness of the pose and the person. Sebastian Stan looks like he’s all of fifteen years old, made of enormous eyes and wide excited smile and equally excited hair and a thoroughly unreasonable chin-dimple. He’s unfairly adorable and enthusiastic and precious. Chris is skeptical on sight.  
  
The authorial blurb says that this is Sebastian Stan’s first novel, that he’s Romanian by birth but living in New York City, that he’s a Rutgers University graduate, one who’s studied Shakespeare and theater at no less impressive a place than the Globe Theatre itself. Chris takes a second to assimilate this. Okay. The adorable fifteen-year-old, who must in fact be not fifteen at all but at least of post-university age, has a pretty fuckin’ prestigious background.  
  
He looks back at the front cover. _Soon to be a major motion picture!_ proclaims a vibrant orange sticker. And, in italics: _Volume One of the bestselling Captain America trilogy!_  
  
The rain tapdances above his head, tempting him on. “Okay,” he says to Sebastian Stan’s smile, to the tempest, “okay, I’m trusting you,” and ignores the fact that he’s talking to no one who can actually hear him and the obvious crazy-woodsman tendencies, and opens the paperback.  
  
Five pages in he realizes he’s holding his breath.  
  
Ten pages after that he’s reading too fast, too impatient, skipping bits because he needs to _know what happens next—_   
  
He forces himself to slow down. To savor.  
  
Halfway through the book he’s crying. These characters, these _people,_ Bucky Barnes loves Steve Rogers and Steve Rogers loves him, that’s so perfect, and they’re such stubborn self-sacrificing idiots and they’ll never say the words because they think the other one deserves more and oh God Bucky on that mad scientist’s cold experimental table, Bucky realizing Steve’s come to get him, Bucky realizing that they’ve both been changed in so many ways and not just by super-serums but by the torturous realities of war—  
  
He puts the book down. Very deliberately gets up and gets trail mix and beef jerky and water. Forces his heart rate back into something resembling calm.  
  
Sebastian Stan’s so fucking good. _So_ good; and Chris is jealous in the way that magicians are jealous, watching a colleague’s smoke-and-mirrors trick come off without a hitch. Chris knows _how_ it’s done, knows about the technicalities and the importance of the right word in the right place. Sebastian Stan knows _all_ the right words.   
  
And that style’s more dramatic, more emotional, than Chris’s own, yeah. More focused on dialogue, more character-driven, more hyperbolic sometimes, and a little too much anthropomorphism and metaphor, sure—but the characters’re fascinating, real wounded aching loving people despite their superpowers and alternate-history setting. That alternate history’s beautifully drawn and constructed like a sculpture of a cyclone: heartpounding and electric and alive, captured in word-art.  
  
Chris wiggles his toes inside his thick woolen socks. The softness comforts him: real and safe. Tangible knitwear.  
  
He tucks himself back into the sleeping bag, portable lantern flipped on as a haven against the storm. Takes a breath, lets it out, decides he’s ready. Picks up the book again.  
  
Some time after that, he flings that book across the tent.   
  
No. No, no, Bucky can’t be dead, not like that, not something so stupid and pointless, except that’s exactly the point, the random moronic losses of war, but it hurts so much, and Chris can practically hear Steve Rogers screaming silently as his heart falls into that ravine too—  
  
But there’s more to the book. There’re two more _books_. And the trilogy does have a happy ending, he remembers hearing that somewhere. He’d forgotten for a minute.  
  
He dives for the poor innocent paperback. Pets the cover, smoothes a bent corner, apologizes to it guiltily. Plunges back in.  
  
He’s sobbing unashamedly by the last page. Heartbroken. Crushed by time travel and lost love and the sheer force of brutal loneliness, displacement from everything that hero’s ever known. It hurts like drowning in molten gold: lovely, inexorable, overwhelming.  
  
He needs the other two books. He needs them now.  
  
He does not have the other two books. He hadn’t bothered picking them up.  
  
He is an idiot. He is a literary-snob lunatic idiot, and he announces as much to his tent and the rain and the whole despairing world. The rain chatters to the tree-leaves and bushes, sharing the news.  
  
He weighs the paperback in one hand, pensively. Sebastian Stan.  
  
He thinks about the anguish of those passages and the drip-drip-drip of falling rain. He thinks, with no logical connection between the thoughts, that Sebastian Stan knows how loneliness feels. How dark and brittle some nights can be.  
  
He thinks that someone who can know that and still write a happy ending must be sort of the bravest person he’s ever known, or up there, anyway.  
  
He thinks that of course he doesn’t know Sebastian Stan, not really, not in any sense except one: he’s read this story, and that’s a form of knowing, a form of intimacy, of sharing of self.  
  
He thinks that he’s walking back to the rest stop in the morning, rain or shine or floods or apocalypses, and shelling out however much money he has to spend to acquire the next two books, dammit.  
  
Plan securely in mind, he nestles into the little pool of light, himself and his oasis of story amid the thundering storm. Cozy toes and, okay, some of his emergency stash of Starburst jellybeans, because his heart’s been through an emotional wringer and requires sugary comfort. And he turns back to the first page of the story and prepares to read it all over again.


	2. you can fall in love by the end of this song

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Chris Evans meets Sebastian Stan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings for this chapter:** Chris having an anxiety attack when meeting Sebastian.

The morning’s damp and sticky and grey, thick with the promise of more rain. The heavens haven’t opened up yet, though. Chris bounces out of bed with superhero-related eagerness. He trips over his sleeping bag, because his sleeping bag clearly hates excitement, but that doesn’t matter. He’s got a plan. He’s going to go buy books. He’s going to get to live in that world some more.  
  
He throws on extra flannel layers and boots, humming “Kiss the Girl” for no reason at all. He’s happy and he’s always loved _The Little Mermaid_. His tent’s not judging. The world’s sunny despite the preponderance of grey. More books, more well-written wonderful books. Yes.  
  
He leaves most of his stuff set up at the campsite—he’ll be back later—and grabs some waterproof gear, a poncho and so on, and heads off to find the trail.   
  
Okay, maybe he runs a little. Or a lot. But: books. Books by Sebastian Stan.  
  
The trail’s not a difficult one; he’d wanted isolation, but not someplace from which he couldn’t readily return. He thinks fleetingly about that tattoo, about Matt’s name over his ribs. Matt, and an off-roading accident, and a body, years ago; he’d not been on that particular trip, and he’ll never know whether that might’ve made a difference. He does know that he wants to check in with his mother and siblings every few days, and he wants to get out easily if someone needs him back home.  
  
The rain meanders back in, sidling up like a wary cat and testing its welcome. Chris has never minded the wet. Pieces of the universe, and he gets to be there too, in some small way. They can share.  
  
Mud is also a piece of the universe. He sighs, and tries to shake splashes off his jeans, and fails thoroughly. The rain scampers alongside in the trees, frivolous as a puppy.  
  
By the time he gets to the unremarkable rest stop—not even enough to be a town, mostly a gas station and a convenience store and some odds-and-ends places for campers headed out to the wilderness—he’s damp from rain and sticky with perspiration under the flannel, but that’s just fine. The walk’s stretched his muscles and cleared his head, nothing but water and earth and sky and anticipation. His bones hum, content.  
  
The same guy’s working the convenience-store register as before; his name-tag says Hello My Name Is Jeremy! in tidy printing, though he’s wearing it upside down. Chris bites his cheek to hide the grin, wondering whether the guy knows, and goes off to poke at the paperback rack.   
  
Ah. There, right there. That name, in silvery lettering. Vivid pulp-fiction pop-culture paperbacks. Volumes two and three of the trilogy. Chris exhales. Touches the letters. Sebastian Stan’s name.  
  
He brings them up to the front, plus some beef jerky and water and the best postcard he can find to send to his brother, which in this case means it’s got a picture of a beaver next to a giant log, which in turn means Scott will fall off his chair laughing because Scott has _that_ sense of humor. My Name Is Jeremy scans this bounty with the same mellow disinterest as before, until he gets to the paperbacks, where he stops. Chris cringes. “Um, I just—I read the first one, is all, I just wanted to finish the story—”  
  
“Dude,” Jeremy announces, whole face lighting up. “The second one’s so awesome, like, I cried, man, the part where—oh, shit, no spoilers, sorry—”  
  
“You’ve read them?”  
  
“ _Everyone’s_ read them, come on—!” Jeremy fishes for something that jangles, attached to his waist. Holds up a snarled bunch of keys proudly. “Got a Winter Soldier keychain. Totally gonna camp out for opening night when the first film’s out, too. Me and all my friends.”  
  
“I think I love Bucky,” Chris says, giving in. “And Steve. Both of them. Together. Until the end—”  
  
“—of the line, fuck yeah.” Jeremy beams at him. Fan recognizing fan. “And that author. I mean, wow.”  
  
“Sebastian Stan,” Chris says, which is a usefully noncommittal statement and hopefully consequently encouraging. Maybe Jeremy knows information he doesn’t.  
  
“Sebastian fucking Stan. That’s, like, a whole other story, someone should write his autobiography or somethin’, seriously. From Communist Romania to Shakespeare to New York City. And he’s so damn _nice_.”  
  
“You’ve _met_ him?” Envy. Instant and snarling. In his chest.  
  
“Me, nah. But he leaves, like, comments on his fans’ Instagram accounts, and posts thank you messages when people give him gifts and shit, and he was giving out hugs to everybody at that one convention even when security told him not to, y’know? Just adorable.”  
  
Chris nods, because he can’t think of anything to say. That _is_ adorable, and Sebastian Stan’s evidently kind to fans on top of being a genius writer and devastatingly attractive, and Chris’s heart’s doing a strange tango of lurching wistfulness and want.  
  
“Plus,” Jeremy observes, “completely hot. Ten out of ten. Would bang on a writing desk. And I’m not even gay. He’s bi, though, maybe it could happen. I’d be in. He’s single, I’m single, I’m just sayin’.”  
  
This time Chris has nothing to say because his brain’s shorted out. Sebastian Stan. On a writing desk. Bisexual, which seems to be common fan knowledge. Single. With that smile, and those eyes, and language like skillful witchcraft at his command.  
  
Jeremy now looks mildly shamefaced. “Um. Sorry. I was just kinda kidding. Wouldn’t happen. I do know about fantasy and reality, okay.”  
  
“No,” Chris’s mouth says, continuing to be on autopilot, “I got that, it’s fine, we’re cool.”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“Yeah. Your nametag’s upside down.”  
  
“Huh,” Jeremy says, looking down at himself. “Guess so. It likes being that way.”  
  
Fair enough, Chris thinks, and says so. Jeremy nods and bags up his purchases, taking time to wrap the paperbacks against the rain, and Chris is nearly out the door when he hears, “Mountain Man Stan Fan! Wait!”  
  
“Mountain Man,” Chris grumbles, pausing in the doorway, “really?”  
  
“The beard. The flannel. Yes, really. So you already know about the book signing, right? This afternoon? In town? By which I mean actual town, because this dump doesn’t count, yeah?”  
  
“Book signing.”  
  
“The one and only Sebastian Stan.”  
  
“…what?”  
  
“He’s doing a book tour. Because they’re putting out some special collector’s edition, all three volumes, plus there’s the news about the film, so he’s out shaking hands and reading chapters to people. And he’s going across the country, like, by train, I have no clue why, but that means he stops in, like, the most random places, so. Today. At five pm. Here-ish. Down the road. _I_ have to work.”  
  
“Oh fuck,” Chris says, or thinks he says. His lips move, anyway.  
  
“There’s probably already a line outside the shop,” Jeremy suggests helpfully, “but you could totally hike over there in time for the reading, I have faith in your muscles, Mountain Man.”  
  
“Stop that…where, again?”  
  
“Here.” Jeremy pulls up a conversation on his smartphone, scrolls, waves the screen at Chris. “He’s not really advertising much because most of the tour stops fill up way in advance, but my friend Scarlett works at the bookshop, so she told me, and the thing is, we’re not that big a place, so he’ll probably sign stuff for everybody. She’s gonna get a collector’s edition signed for me. You should go.”  
  
“I might.” He already knows he will. Stupid and impulsive and obsessive, half in love with a man he’s never met; but it’s not just that. It’s admiration and envy and gratitude: Sebastian Stan’s made him fall head over heels for a book again, for the art of storytelling, and Chris wants to say thank you. Anything more, any sense of connection, exists mostly in his own head; he understands that. He doesn’t know Sebastian Stan and likely never will.  
  
But he does want to say thank you. As someone who needed those books, that hope, right now.  
  
“It’s only a couple miles,” Jeremy nudges. “You can go now and then get back to scaring Bigfoot after.”  
  
“Are we friends now,” Chris says, “is that what we’re doing, ’cause I was gonna offer to come tell you about it after…”  
  
“You so are,” Jeremy agrees, “and I’ll save you extra beef jerky and stupid beaver postcards. Go.”  
  
“Your nametag’s still upside down,” Chris fires back, and takes _his_ books and goes while Jeremy’s laughing.  
  
Outside, he lurks under the scant shelter of the roof’s overhang and glances left to right. Left will take him back to the campsite. To his place, encircling tent-walls and familiar lantern-gleam and the blanket of solitude around his shoulders, no pressure from strangers or literary agents or curious eyes. And the rain’s picking up tempo.  
  
Right will, on the other hand, take him properly into town. Where there’s a bookshop and a line and a couple of ephemeral hours with Sebastian Stan, who will do a reading and sign copies and smile politely and no doubt never be able to pick Chris out of a crowd. The walk back will be dark and cold and soggy and treacherous; not a tricky path, but by the time the event’s over night’ll be encroaching. And Chris will have muddy jeans and a scribbled signature and the memory of Sebastian Stan’s voice to take home.  
  
He looks left again, back at his undemanding private oasis in the woods.   
  
And then he turns right, and splashes through puddles toward the main road, singing Disney tunes under his breath, opening volume two to read along the way.   
  
The line’s indeed long. Stretches around the corner of the shop, which sits peaceably amid local sandwich shops and a shabby-tranquil post office and a ubiquitous Starbucks, proof that certain coffee-related desires can stretch into the most rural corners of New England. The bookshop’s got posters in the window, book covers and Sebastian Stan’s smiling face and promotional material for the upcoming film. Chris, intimidated by the muscular five-foot cardboard cut-out of Steve Rogers: Captain America!, shuffles meekly into a spot at the line’s tail. The girl in front of him gives him a rather sympathetic look, but also puts a bit more space between them.  
  
Chris looks down. At his boots. His muddy boots. And flannel shirt, rained-on jeans, and convenience-store bag of books.   
  
He tries to scrape some of the mud away on the sidewalk’s curb. The rain’s let up but not vanished, shimmering into a ghostly diamond-studded fog. This does not help.   
  
He doesn’t have a watch, but his phone’s in his pocket and durable enough for the weather. He checks. Perfect timing. Four fifty-nine. And despite the mud and the occasional raindrop in his hair and the unnerving fact that there’s a whole bookshop’s worth of people here for the exact same reason—  
  
His heart skips a beat. Sebastian Stan. Now.  
  
And the doors open. Movement at the front of the line.  
  
Chris ventures in with the rest of the adoring horde. They just barely fit. Chairs up against the walls, chairs in aisles. Probably breaking fire code. Probably nobody cares. The shelves of science-fiction and biographies and histories and romance hold papery breath and lean in too. Chris finds a seat at the edge of one row, shoulder to shoulder with some ironic Jonathan Swift, and reminds himself to exhale.   
  
He also eyes his feet. Nope, not magically-disappearing mud. Damn.  
  
Noise at the front, which is in fact the back, of the shop. Laughter. A door swinging wide to admit the chatter of voices and a pool of damp black streetgleam. The scent of coffee. Chris’s palms’re sweaty.   
  
Sebastian Stan takes a sip from the Starbucks cup in his hand, turns toward the throng, smiles. He’s wearing a grey scarf and a ridiculously fashionable newsboy cap and clinging jeans. He’s wearing a grin that unfurls like sunshine and rain: like tropical showers, bright and vibrant and sensual and skin-shivering, goosebumps under shooting stars.  
  
He’s taller than Chris might’ve guessed from the author bio, though the height’s mostly legs, like a baby egret peeking out of its nest at the big wide world. He looks a little older—well, of course, Chris mocks his own foolishness; Sebastian’d have to be superhuman himself to’ve not aged since the first novel—and a little thinner, puppyish softness replaced by lean muscle; he’s beautiful either way, the kind of unthinking loveliness that can make a room full of people catch simultaneous breaths, and he’s…  
  
…tired, Chris thinks, and then in the next second isn’t sure why. Something around the eyes. In the way he’s leaning a hip against the table, terribly casual. In the unremarked fleeting blink of eyelashes as he sips his brand-name caffeine, under the avid shine of overhead lights.  
  
But that tiredness—if it is tiredness, if Chris’s anxious brain isn’t simply projecting—vanishes in the next heartbeat, the instant a pretty blonde woman comes up and touches Sebastian’s shoulder. She says something too quiet to hear, intimate, head bent; Sebastian turns the smile up and turns it on her, magically dazzling and genuine at once. It’s real affection, true as gold; Chris would bet his life on that, and his poor overworked heart whimpers sadly, having not yet learned that sappy romantic bookshop meet-ups don’t come true. But it’s also a performance, in the way that actors on a stage perform: heart and soul thrown into a play.  
  
The petite pretty blonde sighs. Shakes her head at her writer, scolding and familiar. Sebastian laughs softly, salutes her with the coffee-cup, shakes his head right back and says something inaudible. They look happy, Chris decides, even if they’re currently mildly disagreeing.  
  
And then Sebastian stops leaning on the table and gets upright and turns toward the assembled fans. The blonde girl vanishes with fairylike quickness. And Chris realizes that Sebastian’s performance earlier was a dress rehearsal: this is the real thing, stops pulled out, utter delight on display in eyes and mouth and sudden energy. The room cheers. Sound reverberates off the shelves. Chris can’t cheer, because he’s trapped in the airless amber shock of dreams come to life.  
  
“You guys,” Sebastian declares, standing in front of his signing table in skinny jeans and striped sweater and carelessly looped scarf and well-concealed weary courage, “are the fucking best fans anyone could ask for, coming out in the rain like this, thank you so much!” and the cheers redouble.   
  
Sebastian’s voice is as extraordinary as the rest of him. Woodsmoke and velvet. New York layered over mountainous wilder country, cities of vampires and princes and revolutions. Hints of mystical lands in curling r’s and l’s and liquid vowels, appearing and disappearing like stray ripples in a pond. Chris wants to write him into a story, an epic, a saga. Heroic. Full of enchanted warriors and gods and goddesses falling in love.  
  
Sebastian also apparently happily swears in front of fans. Chris, as an aficionado of four-letter words, admires this trait.  
  
“Right,” Sebastian goes on, circling around his table. It’s an old table, likely dragged over from the café next door: oaken and scuffed and beaten by time, thrown in here for a hastily-arranged encounter with the emperor of bestseller lists. Sebastian runs a hand over it absentmindedly, and the wood perks up like it’s new-hewn again, resolved to be the best table it can possibly be.  
  
“I’m going to actually sit down,” Sebastian says, doing just that, “sorry, I’m feeling a little jetlagged—can I say jetlagged? I wasn’t even on a plane, I came in on the train, um, fuck, sorry, what was I trying to say?” The adorably confused face he makes could launch a thousand ships, all of them carrying warm blankets and hot beverages and therapeutic supplies. Wars’d be fought over who got to cuddle him. Chris can see it.   
  
He shoves these bizarre speculations down and stacks mental furniture atop them. Sebastian’s talking. “—and I got a little bit sick last week—I’m fine, it’s okay, don’t worry—but my manager thinks that getting off my feet’s important, so we’ve got a microphone and a table and—well, she’s over there, and she’s fantastic, Margarita, say hi!”   
  
The blonde girl, sitting neatly atop one of the sales desks with demurely crossed legs, rolls her eyes. Waves. Complains, “As your manager I object to you being out of bed and having caffeine and generally ignoring my very good advice,” but she’s smiling when she says it.  
  
Manager. Chris’s heart relearns how to swing on trapezes. Sebastian _is_ single, or so My Name Is Jeremy’d said.  
  
Another very pertinent tidbit of information nags at his emotions. He’d been right after all. Sebastian’s tired and ill, and that momentary leaning on a bookshop table hadn’t been casual in the least. Chris’s writer’s eye for incongruities had caught that much, and God he wishes he’d been wrong. Sebastian, he thinks, as if the beautiful jewel-eyed man with the treasure-box smile can hear him: Sebastian, please be safe.  
  
Sebastian offers to read whatever chapter the crowd desires—“I love all my words, you can’t pick something I don’t like!”—and by overwhelming demand ends up with a certain scene from the middle volume of the trilogy. Chris knows precisely which one, and he’s not surprised the fans’ve voted for it. So many emotions, so much passion and pain and love. Captain America and the Winter Soldier on a helicarrier, the fate of the world at stake. A beloved. A mission. Broken cheekbones and bullets through the gut and words torn from pulverized hearts: _finish it, ’cause I’m with you—_  
  
Chris had wept, then. Standing frozen under feather-curl grey mists, surrounded by the damp green scents of soggy trees and wet asphalt, knowing he had ten minutes to get to the bookshop for the night’s event, he’d wept.  
  
His eyes get prickly now, as Sebastian reads. No shame. Half the audience’s crying or mouthing the scene along with the author, or both at once. He’s glad he’d at least managed to get through volume two: he’s not getting this kick to the heart for the very first time, so it’s marginally easier to weather, and also he’s caught up as far as plot, so far.  
  
_Marginally_ easier to weather. Sebastian’s—not merely a good reader. Sebastian’s brilliant.   
  
Sebastian reads like romance and tragedy, like the entirety of human existence, hearts and souls and anguish and glory, has been distilled down into these simple lines on a page. The bookshop walls fall away in the visceral crack of bone, of voice, of metal, of desperate unadulterated love. And the scene comes alive.  
  
Sebastian does love his characters. Emblazoned across every word, every inflection.   
  
Sebastian finishes on a down-beat, on a simple line, an image: the glint of water and sunshine on metal, a hand reaching beneath a surface, finding hope.  
  
The audience remains voiceless for a heartbeat or two: suspended.  
  
And then they sag a little and breathe out, and cry or sniffle or hug a neighbor; and the murky green waters of the Potomac shiver back into book-lined walls and uncomfortable wooden chairs, and Sebastian Stan’s fingers’re lying still and affectionate across the closed cover of the story.  
  
Sebastian says to the crowd, or maybe only to the book, or to both: “Thank you.” He’s smiling very faintly, almost to himself; but there’s that tiredness again, a kind of transcendent worn-thin joy after elation, falling to the rougher rocks of earth. He even coughs once, muffling it in his sleeve; his face is pale. His unobtrusively competent pretty manager’s right beside him with a covered cup of what Chris hopes is herbal tea.  
  
The applause swells once everyone comes back down and remembers how. The noise is long, and sincere, and full of adoration. Chris nearly forgets to join in. He’s watching Sebastian’s eyes close in pleasure at the kindness of that hot beverage as it slides down his throat. Sebastian looks up, after, and glances out at the hero-worshipping crowd right as Chris belatedly slams palms together too loudly; winter-ocean eyes flick his direction, then blink as if surprised or unsure, but Chris is staring and being creepy, of course Sebastian’s unsure—  
  
He ducks his head, flush blooming along the back of his neck. When he looks up again, Sebastian’s talking to, best guess, the bookshop owner, or at least the woman who seems to be directing the event. She may or may not be the eponymous Hayley of Hayley’s Book Nest, but she’s got lots of people doing exactly what she says, and at the moment this involves getting Sebastian set up for the signing line. Sebastian smiles and settles in behind the table, assorted pens at the ready; volunteer assistants come around and shoo everyone out of chairs and into some semblance of a line, crooked and fat and anticipatory. Chris clutches his bag of paperbacks. Loses track of blue eyes.  
  
He ends up about halfway through the line, next to a rack of romantically-inclined novels with flagrantly lustful covers. They have titles about seduction and sin and dark desires. Chris feels his face get hotter. He’s not opposed, of course—he’s got fantasies like anyone else, he’s looked some things up, he’s got a diabolical younger brother who once bought him a year’s subscription to a sex-toy-of-the-month club. It’s just that the line’s kind of slow, nowhere else to politely look, and the handcuffs on _that_ cover’re leering at him.  
  
The line to meet Sebastian Stan. Handcuffs. Dark desires. Sebastian Stan’s expressive wrists and shining eyes. Chris slams the lid on _that_ daydream before it can do more than hint at materialization. Now is _not_ the time. Good _God_ , Chris.  
  
Maybe later. In his tent. Which won’t tell anyone.  
  
And now he’s got a different worry. The line’s moving a bit faster, Sebastian getting into a rhythm up at the front, the bookshop volunteers sorting out an efficient system of moving bodies along. Chris hopes they’ve got ice for his signing hand and a comfortable chair; he’s been on the other end of this industrial system, though never—he eyes the distant tail of admirers—for quite so many. He’d never been great at it: too loud, over-eager, fumbling through expressions of honest gratitude to his readers. He’s got immeasurable sympathy for those readers, always has: he knows the agonizing struggle to say something clever, significant—something at all, when looked at with expectation—  
  
Oh fuck.  
  
He’s going to have to say something to Sebastian Stan.  
  
This horrified realization keeps him from noticing as the line moves. He moves with it, mechanically. It’s not _that_ long a line; Jeremy’d been right about the small town and lack of advertising and semi-secret events. Won’t be much more time to prepare.  
  
Some fans’ve brought gifts. Art of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes. Hand-made bracelets. A tiny bag of blueberry-vanilla ground coffee. Chris looks at his own empty hands. He could’ve made a sketch. He knows how to draw, or he thinks he does, on good days. He hadn’t thought of that. He hadn’t _thought_.   
  
He knows what he wants to say. Thank you. You made me smile and cry and feel; you made me remember how much I love the art of storytelling and the sheer acrobatic tapdance _fun_ of what we do; you gave me a story when I needed that, and I know I’m not a real fan, I’m not even done reading the books, I just wanted to say…  
  
How can he possibly say all of that? How can he say anything? He can’t, he’ll never have the words for what this has meant, those cool delighted eyes’ll look at him with pity and compassion and Chris’s hands’re getting cold and his skin feels clammy—  
  
“Only one item,” chirps the closest perky volunteer, breaking into his panic, “Sebastian’s kind of not feeling well, so we’re just doing one per guest, plus one of the collected special editions if you bought one today, okay?”  
  
Chris croaks, “…what?”  
  
“One item,” she repeats. “You’ll want to get it out, you’re almost up, and if you could write down the name, if you want it personalized, that’d be great?”  
  
Chris can’t breathe.   
  
Chris can’t breathe and the walls’re looming and his heart’s battering itself to pieces against his ribs and people are looking now, looking and judging, while he can’t even get words out and he can’t be a writer and Sebastian Stan doesn’t need his thanks and he’s wobbling on his feet because, hey, the floor’s gone uneven, helpful of it, and there’re dazzling sparkles joining the party in his vision—  
  
“Chris,” a voice interjects between the sparkles. An extremely recognizable voice. Chris is in love with that voice, some sort of hopeless impossible daydream love, and it’d be wonderful if he could answer the voice or get his feet to move and run away in shame.  
  
A hand takes his sweaty plastic book-bag away. Another hand, long-fingered and sure and concerned, catches his elbow, eases him down to sit on the floor next to the signing table. The closest table-leg’s oaken and solid and unperturbed by the ravages of time. Chris tries to focus on that, but the scratches skid wildly before his eyes. His chest hurts. Too tight.  
  
“Chris,” Sebastian says again. One hand on Chris’s left shoulder. An anchor: no demands, only a simple point of contact. “Can you hear me?”  
  
Yes, Chris thinks, and tries to nod. The panic doesn’t want to let him.  
  
“All right. Good. You’re here, I’m here, we’re fine. I want you to do something, if you can.” Sebastian’s voice shows no hint of the disgust or disgruntlement he must be feeling. As if fans pass out at his feet every day of the week. Maybe they do. Maybe this is normal. Chris hates himself but clings to the calm of that voice anyway, shamelessly.   
  
“I want you,” Sebastian says, “to breathe with me, okay? Along with me, I’ll be right here with you, _da?_ ” That calm fractures briefly at the end. Language-slips. Worry sneaking out, revealed. Chris squeezes both eyes shut, risks opening them. The floor’s cold underneath his ass. Sebastian’s a kitten-pile of warmth and long legs beside him.  
  
“Breathe in,” Sebastian tells him, “with me.” He holds out his other hand; Chris grabs it. Too tightly, but Sebastian doesn’t flinch. “Ready? In. Out. Good. One more. And one more, and this time we’re going to hold it, all right? I’ll count.” He waits. Chris nods again. Sebastian says, “In,” and then starts counting backwards, counting down. Ten. Nine. Eight. Down to one. Evenly paced, diminishing numbers, forward progress. Again.   
  
The thumping of Chris’s heart slows. Grey twinkles backing off around his vision. He finds he’s counting along with Sebastian in his head.   
  
“Good.” Sebastian’s eyes, now that Chris can focus better, are very close, and very concerned, and very sympathetic. No other emotions present. Up close the blue’s even more startling: some kind of rare elusive flower-shade, shimmering between turquoise and water-topaz and the sky before rain, like nothing Chris’s ever seen. He holds onto that shade. A lifeline.  
  
They breathe together, himself and Sebastian Stan. Sitting on a bookshop floor, half under a table, in a tiny town in the middle of New England forests.  
  
One of the myriad assistants must’ve brought a bottle of water; Chris doesn’t recall that, but Sebastian holds it up, opens it, tilts it his way: yes, no, not yet? Chris opens his mouth and ends up giving a kind of helpless head-wobble in reply.  
  
“Here.” Sebastian takes Chris’s other hand. Presses an object into it. “Hold this for me. Don’t think about anything else, for a minute. Just sit here with me, and—think about _being_ here, _da?_ About this pen. My hand. Touch. Please.” His voice shivers again: tremors along normally-sweet piano keys. Chris doesn’t want to hear earthquakes in that voice.  
  
He looks at the object Sebastian’s handed him, as if acceptance’ll be some magically-comprehended token of appreciation. It is indeed a pen: one of Sebastian’s signing-pens, sleek and slim and silver, vaguely futuristic in a nineteen-fifties spaceship way. Like it might leap from his palm into the stars. Starting a voyage.  
  
It’s heavy, and steel-silk to the touch, and cleanly defined. It’s an object. He can feel the weight. Can name the color and move his fingers and know how it fits in his hand.   
  
It’s real. He’s here.   
  
Suddenly exhausted everywhere—coming back to ground after an anxiety attack’ll do that, he’s found—and aware enough to be mortified, he shuts his eyes. Closes his hand around the pen. Tips his head against the table-leg, with the resultant _thunk_ being more or less exactly how he feels.   
  
Sebastian Stan’s on the floor with him, talking him through an anxiety attack. Sebastian, who’s not well himself, who doesn’t need this—  
  
Without moving, he confesses, “I’m sorry.”  
  
“For what?” Sebastian inches closer. Chris can feel him, millimeters away. Chris’s entire body can feel him. “I’ve got the water if you’d like it now. Or not. No hurry.”  
  
Chris gives up on any tattered shreds of dignity and opens his eyes. “Yeah, okay…”  
  
Sebastian’s fingers are chilly and considerate when they brush his, handing the bottle over. “Not a bad view, down here. I believe that’s Asimov’s _Fantastic Voyage_ , on that bottom shelf.”  
  
“Is it?” Why not. Surreal conversations, stories involving miniaturized people, full-body anguish, the discomfort of drying sweat, the distressed susurrations of the crowd above. “You like Asimov?”  
  
“I do. I like most classic science fiction.” Sebastian tips that head, grins at him. The fashionable newsboy cap’s gone, doubtless lost in the dive to Chris’s side, and his scarf’s askew. He’s smiling like there’s no place he’d rather be. “I always wanted to be an astronaut. Other planets, far-off places, worlds we can’t even begin to imagine. Any better?”  
  
“Yeah, I—” The answer’s a reflex, the way he answers when well-meaning acquaintances try to help; and then it’s not a reflex, because, he realizes, it’s true. “Yeah. That—thank you. I mean. Thank you.”  
  
Sebastian’s smile grows even more, though he ducks his head to hide it: a surprisingly shy gesture from the man who’d so competently brought Chris out from the whitewater rapids.  
  
“Wait,” Chris says this time. “You—she said you weren’t feeling—I mean, shit, are _you_ —”  
  
At this narratively abysmal moment Sebastian’s sylphlike manager turns up from no visible place and rests a proprietary hand on her charge’s shoulder. “Sebastian—”  
  
“I’m fine,” Sebastian says to her, and then says it again to Chris. “I’m only—I sort of had pneumonia, a little bit, last week, and—”  
  
“You can’t have pneumonia a little bit!” Chris flusters, horrified all over again, though for a brand-new reason.  
  
“You woke me up trying to get the cap off the bottle of painkillers because you had a headache so bad you couldn’t open it, this morning,” Margarita says.  
  
“In my defense, that cap was literally broken,” Sebastian says, “and if anyone hears you and assumes, _again_ , that I’m sleeping with my manager, when we’re only sharing a hotel room for expenses—”  
  
“Headache?” Chris asks.  
  
“I’m just tired!”  
  
Chris finds himself trading a glance with Margarita, somehow. Himself and Sebastian’s manager: apparently the two-thirds of the under-the-signing-table party with any sense. Which in fact makes zero sense, but nothing much in his life does right now.   
  
“Sebastian,” Margarita says—practically an order this time, and Chris kind of wants to snap back at her tone on Sebastian’s behalf, but she’s also _right_ —“get up off the floor, it’s filthy, we’ll get you back to the hotel and you can rest, your fan is fine, see, he’s telling you to go—”  
  
“Wait—” Sebastian looks conflicted. “Chris—don’t leave? Please? I have a few more people to sign for, but after that—”  
  
“After that you’re going to bed,” Margarita states. Inscribed in stone. Granite. “I know I’m going to lose the signing argument, we did this in New York already, I _know_ , okay? Look, I’ll make sure he—Chris, was it?—gets one of the pre-signed collector’s editions for free and gets home safe, and I’ll let you stay if you don’t argue.”  
  
“Chris,” Sebastian starts, but more bookshop employees’re popping out of the woodwork to check on him, and the very strong owner nicely but firmly gets Chris on his feet and then into a chair in the back office even while he tries to simultaneously say he’s fine and also keep an eye on Sebastian, two endeavors doomed to failure by external good intentions. Another minion brings him more water; a second runs back with both Chris’s paperbacks in their rain-spotted bag and a signed collector’s set of the Captain America trilogy: gilt-edged paper, leather covers, expensively ostentatiously new.  
  
Chris can’t bring himself to touch the leather. Gilt, and guilt: so much inconvenience, for all for them, from Sebastian to Margarita to Hayley and her bookshop employees…  
  
He still has Sebastian’s pen. Clutched in his left hand. Not being missed, apparently. Must be more of them lying around.   
  
He looks down at it. And he looks out through the half-shut manager’s office door, at the rows of tidy shelves and the corner of a signing-table and the glimpse of Sebastian Stan’s arm in motion: leaning forward to talk to someone, to smile at another fan, to write out a meaningful personalized message in a book that isn’t Chris’s last-minute rest-stop purchase.  
  
He’d known from the words on every page, wielded with such love, that the writer had to be kind.   
  
Sebastian’s laughing at whatever joke this fan’s made. The sound floats all the way back to Chris’s isolated spot in the office, bumping up against lonely filing cabinets and a desktop lamp and an incurious paperwork tray.   
  
Sebastian’d asked him not to leave. Margarita’d offered to call him a cab. Sebastian’s recovering from a serious illness, and is a truly generous man with a good heart, and will stay to sign books for every person who’s come. For all those persons who can say the words: who’re actually capable of telling him how much this means.   
  
Chris gets up. He’s shaky for a step or two, but he’s fine, he’s able to put one foot in front of the other, and it’s a manageable hike back to his campsite even in the dark.   
  
He knows no one’ll notice him leaving.  
  
He takes all the books, even the shiny new impersonal consolation prize. He can’t bear not to. He puts Sebastian’s pen in his pocket and doesn’t look back.  
  
He makes it back along the trail and through the woods and to the welcome folds of his refuge without incident beyond a few scattered raindrops and one or two stumbles over tree-roots. He’s good at seeing in the dark, always has been, and the dark’s safer right now. The shadows hide the drops that might not be rain, when he walks into his clearing and stops for a split second and closes his eyes.  
  
Bootless and feeling hollowed-out, scraped dry as desert bone, he ends up lying on his back staring blankly up at the blue canvas dome overhead. So much blue, he thinks; and then he has to laugh, and then he has to press a hand over his mouth to not cry. The bag with the books in it plops over onto its side, possibly out of shared misery.   
  
He drinks more water, rehydrating. He eats some jellybeans because sugar’ll help with the crash, and flops an arm—a useless mountain man flannel-clad arm, versus Sebastian Stan’s skinny-scarf-and-trendy-boots style; God, how can he even pretend to have fantasies, he can’t be _anything_ Sebastian’d want—across his eyes.   
  
As he’s wallowing for just another minute or two in the glory that is his personal tragedy, two questions pop up and hit him over the head like the heaviest blunt-object cliché. He literally feels his mouth drop open, as they rattle around his skull and blithely rearrange his world.  
  
First: why does Sebastian Stan know actual therapy-advised coping techniques?  
  
And Sebastian _does_ , that’s inarguable: the counting-down of breaths, the careful avoidance of any demands in touch or tone, the makeshift solid object as an anchor. Chris sticks a hand in his pocket. Sets Sebastian’s pen on the pillow, where he can regard it when he rolls his head that way. It winks back in slim space-grey and offers no information, protecting its person. Chris would do the same.  
  
Second: why does Sebastian Stan know Chris’s name?  
  
He flips through the memories, too fascinated and astonished to mind the embarrassment now. He’d never managed to get it out before panicking. He’s _sure_ he didn’t. But Sebastian’d known. Had put a hand on his shoulder and sat on the bookshop floor at his side and called him by name.  
  
That means…  
  
What _does_ that mean?  
  
Chris has no clue what that means. The pen perches on his pillow, smug as only an inanimate line of ink and steel can be.  
  
He turns both thoughts over and around and over again, examining the questions from all possible angles. The two conclusions that keep coming up—partial, unresolved, curiosity-snagging—seem incredible. Implausible, at the very least. Less than likely. Possible. Maybe.  
  
To the second: Sebastian knows who Chris is, and…somehow…unbelievably…recognized him. Despite the beard. And the flannel. And the mud.  
  
To the first: Sebastian knows about pain. Chris had thought as much once before, reading those books, buoyed by the depth of compassion woven through every word. Sebastian knows about drowning and a hand outflung in a last grasp at a life-preserver; about sleepless nights and the bravery of accepting help when that life-preserver’s thrown his way. Chris knows without knowing why or when or what; but he _knows_ : Sebastian’s been knocked around by vicious waves too, somewhere in the past, and Chris’s heart aches even though there’s nothing he can do in the present.  
  
And Sebastian knows his name.   
  
He still doesn’t know what that means. But the night and the tent and the whole rain-drenched universe feel a little less lonely at the idea.  
  
He’ll likely never see Sebastian again. He wishes he could. He wishes he could have one more chance. He wishes he could know whether Sebastian’s safe and well and tucked up someplace warm and full of pillows. He knows he’ll never know. He doesn’t mean anything to Sebastian Stan, of course.  
  
And if he doesn’t, well—he’s got the memory. The kindness. The tantalizing unsolved mystery. One of those ephemeral enchanted stories, glowing like a campfire, warming him from inside for days to come.  
  
He sits up, and picks up the third and final volume of the Captain America trilogy, and finds himself smiling at the image of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes on the cover, under the author’s name.


	3. so get up, get up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Chris and Sebastian have coffee.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Minor warnings** for brief mention of past self-harm, long over.

Chris oversleeps the next morning, the result of post-anxiety listlessness and lethargy, and fails to cook bacon in any decent form over his tiny campstove; but he eats it anyway, and when he opens the tent-flap the world’s opalescent and glimmering as a fairytale. Grey satin and water-drops decorating trees. Vivid biting chill when he inhales. His lungs wake up, and he wakes up more too.  
  
He splashes water on his face, doesn’t bother to shave, embraces the odd fatalistic optimism. He’s alive and he’s got overcooked bacon and he met Sebastian Stan and, yeah, he made an idiot of himself. But the world didn’t end. Kept on spinning, in fact, and hung the sky with slow-scampering clouds. Beautiful, and he’s here to see it.  
  
He ponders the silvery roll of fog through tree-tops for a second, then ducks back inside the tent. Grabs the closest blank notebook. The first pen that comes to hand.  
  
It’s not words, but it is a sketch. The crooked quirk of a branch, the inquisitive pool of mist up a grey-brown trunk, the careless poise of a single raindrop before diving from a leaf to an unknown fate. Chris slows, catches breath, considers. The lines are rough and hurried, but…  
  
…not bad. Not bad at all.  
  
He writes underneath the leaf, _I’m not sure I know how you feel, but I think I do know how you feel, and I’m grateful to be part of the world as I write this._ He’s not sure it’s good prose, but it’s honest, and it’s letters and creation on paper. That’s something.  
  
He taps the pen against the paper, leaving an ink-spot, bizarre bubbling-over sensation building in his chest; and then he realizes which pen he’s picked up.   
  
Sebastian’s pen. He’s not even surprised, though he does laugh and say “Thank you” to the world at large.  
  
In the same pensive ebullient mood, he decides he’s not going to push the creativity when it’s so newborn, but he _is_ going to be productive and get around to mailing the postcard that he’d not managed to send to Scott the day before. He grins at the animal on the front, scribbles _Enjoy the beaver!_ on the back, and sets out on the journey to the post office with messy hair and the inexplicable need to whistle show tunes. A few birds chirp back. He wonders what they’re saying. He kind of hopes the whistled form of “Singin’ In The Rain” isn’t blasphemously rude in Sparrow, though maybe that’d liven up their day.  
  
Back into town, only a couple of miles, easy to walk; the rain comes back on and off, companionably, near the end, and follows him like a puppy to the post office and hangs around outside for him to be done. He runs a hand through his hair, across his beard. Sebastian Stan’s clean-shaven and sweet-faced and bright-eyed; that contrast doesn’t hurt as much as it had the night before, when Chris’d contemplated his own flannel and mud and grown-out facial hair and mentally aligned that with Sebastian’s stylish coltish slimness and scarves. More like a melancholy memory of a self-inflicted injury, that one.  
  
He eyes the all-purpose shop across the street. Wonders whether he could use new socks; might as well find more to do before he walks back and stares at blank paper. Distractions, idle tasks. Breathing room.  
  
When he crosses the street—at the stop sign because he’s a good law-abiding citizen—he ends up in front of a corner coffee-shop. It’s a local shop with green awnings and gentle topaz lights and eclectic bookshelves along one wall. It’s a shop with big picture windows so patrons can smile at friendly passersby on the sidewalk, and it’s a shop with espresso coziness practically emanating from the walls, and it’s a shop _with Sebastian Stan curled up in a low-slung plush chair near the closest window._  
  
Sebastian Stan. Wearing another jauntily striped black-and-white sweater over black jeans and boots, sleeves pushed up, comfortable and established. Sipping out of an oversized mug, fiddling with another of his favorite silver pens, glancing up from a slender black notebook to stare into the middle distance for a minute, no doubt thinking up the next great line in the next bestseller—  
  
And seeing Chris. Who’s frozen to the spot. Watching.  
  
While Chris is internally screaming and flailing and dissolving into fanboy mortification, Sebastian actually waves at him, some sort of complicated gesture that seems to encompass _don’t go anywhere_ and _are you okay_ and _hang on a sec_ , and then jumps up from his spot, trips dramatically over a chair-leg—Chris winces—and runs out the door.  
  
And stops. Outside that door. In front of Chris. Who has forgotten everything he might’ve ever learned about making sounds, never mind conversation.  
  
The rain plops down on the café awning above. A few devious drops blow sideways and get caught in Sebastian’s fluffy hair and then sit there, smug in this triumph.  
  
“Hi,” Sebastian says, getting breath back, one hand pressed to his side; Chris, because the universe hates him, relearns how to talk at the exact same second, which means he ends up saying, “Are you okay—” over Sebastian’s greeting. “Sorry—”  
  
“Oh, no, sorry, go ahead—”  
  
“No, you first—”  
  
They both stop. Approaching thunder rumbles in Viking-hammer exasperation.  
  
Chris wants to sink into one of the puddles on the ground. Eyes the nearest one. Is that one friendly?  
  
But Sebastian’s smiling, brilliant and vibrant in the damp. Holding up one hand. Pointing at Chris, eyes glittering with genuine uncritical amusement: you first.  
  
Chris, in a marvelous display of conversational prowess, manages, “Um.”  
  
Sebastian’s mouth does a sneaky little twitch like he’s trying valiantly not to laugh. “Yes?”  
  
“…are you…sort of…you tripped over the chair…okay?”  
  
“Wait,” Sebastian says, “that was _my_ question—!” and then starts laughing, cheerful and heartfelt and entertained by the situation and as far as Chris can tell not mocking Chris’s idiocy in the least.   
  
Because he’s unutterably grateful and heart-lightened and kind of in love on the spot, he says, “You first!” and points back that direction. “I asked first!” And Sebastian looks thoroughly delighted and grins, which makes Chris grin, and the whole damn world brightens up and gets buoyant in the eye of the storm.  
  
“I’m all right.” Sebastian takes his arm, tips that head back toward the café. “I’m used to that. Come in, you’re getting wet, it’s pouring lions and wolves out here.”  
  
“Cats and dogs?” Chris comes willingly. Lured by the warmth of the building, the scent of cinnamon on Sebastian’s breath, the resonance of that hand on his arm. That touch shouldn’t sink through all the layers and into his bones, but it does.  
  
“ _Da_. Yes. But bigger. More ferocious. Let me get you coffee.”   
  
“ _Oh_ no—” Chris says, and they have a goodnatured squabble over who’s paying, one that lasts right up until they get to the counter, where the barista overhears them and announces that Sebastian Stan will not be paying for any coffee while she’s on duty, and also could he please share any tidbits about what happened to Gabe Jones and the rest of the Howling Commandos in the years the books don’t quite cover, after Steve and Bucky vanished?  
  
Sebastian smiles sweetly and starts talking about grandchildren and spy agency legacies. Chris, suddenly struck by the absolute unlikelihood of the situation, stands there watching him. Thirty seconds ago they’d been bickering over who got to buy whose coffee. Himself and Sebastian Stan.  
  
They grab a table. It’s a happy table, nestled snugly in its own personal corner. Dark wood and old knots and a history of burns and nicks. Old-fashioned music drifts around the room: Billie Holiday, slow and soulful and plaintive, woven in with the rustle of rain and low chatter and the hiss of steamed milk behind the bar. The other customers clearly recognize Sebastian, who of course has already been here this morning, but politely opt to leave them alone to talk at their chosen spot. Chris takes a seat, though not until after Sebastian does. “You’re used to what, exactly? Running into chairs?”  
  
“Chairs, tables, doors…if it’s a piece of furniture I’ve probably tripped over it…I’d be a dreadful action hero. Your turn. Are you well enough, today?”  
  
The phrasing twigs a spark of curiosity in Chris’s writer’s hindbrain. Well _enough_. As if Sebastian knows about anxiety, about victories, about a way of living that’s always a process, one day at a time. He says, “Better. Um. Thanks. You know.”  
  
“Yes.” Sebastian’s smile this time is smaller, more private, but no less true. It leaves Chris oddly breathless, like the air in his lungs has been momentarily replaced by dizzy rainbow light. Their coffee arrives at this timely moment and saves him from having to talk with his body and heart filled up with prisms.  
  
Sebastian, evidently deciding to not press the topic—and oh Chris could kiss him for that, though Chris could kiss him regardless, and Chris should absolutely not be imagining kissing those lips in a public coffee-shop space—takes a sip of his cinnamon-nutmeg-praline confection. Chris stares, mesmerized.  
  
Sebastian puts his oversized mug down, licks his lips, smiles. Chris remembers that it’s probably his turn to start the conversation, casts about frantically, and lands on, “I didn’t expect you to be here,” which is not the absolute worst thing he could’ve said but close to it. Implying that he came to town assuming Sebastian’d be gone. Fuck, he’s a moron.  
  
But Sebastian takes this awful statement at face value and simply shrugs, a causal motion of shoulders. Chris could watch that movement all day. All year. For a lifetime. “A mudslide, evidently. Blocking train tracks in the direction of departure. I seem to be here for at least another day.” And then, for no easily explicable reason, “Sorry.”  
  
“Huh? For what?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“You said—never mind. Train?”  
  
“I don’t…well, I got my driver’s license at sixteen, but I’ve not driven in years, certainly not in this weather, and I don’t fly…I mean I can. I do. If I have to. I prefer trains. And I’ve got time to spare in the tour schedule.”  
  
“You don’t like planes?”  
  
Sebastian makes a _you had to ask_ sort of face at him. This shouldn’t be adorable but is. “I get…nervous isn’t the word…I _know_ the physics works. I just have never quite convinced my instincts of that. It’s takeoffs and landings, mostly.”  
  
Chris nods. He’s not scared of flying, but he gets it: that gap between knowing and _knowing_ , deep down in gut and bones and soul, in the irrational spaces where skittering many-legged apprehensions hide. Sebastian Stan, meeting his gaze across a heat-scarred café table, looks profoundly relieved, like he’s maybe seeing that understanding in Chris’s eyes. Chris hopes so.  
  
He offers, a sentence for the connection hanging unspoken between them, “I can kinda see you on trains. Old-fashioned ones. Steampunk. A traveling author. Victorian waistcoats and, um, a magic typewriter.”  
  
Sebastian’s eyes get intrigued and a touch more appreciative. “Creating realities. With every word conjured into existence. Which you do so well, by the way, I meant to tell you yesterday. I loved _Stillness of a Waterfall_. That bit about how noises can fade into rushing silence, carrying you out of yourself into water and light, that was exquisite.”  
  
Chris is pretty sure his mouth’s hanging open, maybe even making pitiful shocked insignificant sounds, but he’s powerless to close it or form syllables or even think.  
  
“Ah.” Sebastian Stan actually fucking blushes. Cheeks flushed pink above a lip-bite and a sapphire scarf. “Sorry. _Îmi pare rău._ I don’t mean to be an unfortunate type of fan, I promise I don’t, I tried not to say anything but I couldn’t not…I’m very sorry. I love the intimacy of description in your prose. I’ll stop talking to you for possibly forever. Would you like more coffee? Or I can go. You can stay, I can just—”  
  
“You read my book!”  
  
Sebastian stops verbally panicking and freezes halfway out of his seat. “Three times…oh no, no, you didn’t need to know that…”  
  
“Oh my God,” Chris elaborates. “Oh my fuckin’ God. You. You read my. Book.”  
  
“I…did, yes?”  
  
“Oh fuck me,” Chris says, and puts both hands over his face, laughs briefly, drops them, peeks up at Sebastian. “ _No one’s_ read my book.”  
  
“Which is entirely untrue _and_ unfair if it is true.” Sebastian sits back down rather indignantly, nearly knocking over his coffee along the way. The indignation’s on Chris’s behalf. Embarrassment forgotten. “Many people have read your book. Awards committees. Reviewers. Everyone to whom I recommended it. And they enjoyed it.”  
  
“ _You_ read my book.”  
  
“And you read mine, so I’d say we’re even.” Sebastian studies him. Uncanny insight framed in blue. Accompanied by another small cough, drowned in coffee and cream and heroic effort; Sebastian may be recover _ing_ , but not recovered. The verb tense clenches a fist around Chris’s heart and clamps down. “That’s not all you’re worried about. Not that you have to tell me, of course. But if you’d like…I’d like to listen.”  
  
“No…I mean yeah, I can…I mean I want to…” Chris cringes. He does want to, and he knows exactly how it’ll sound, and he wants Sebastian to _like_ him, which he’s aware is clingy and pathetic and also an unequivocal truth of his existence. “ ’s not important.”  
  
“If it worries you,” Sebastian answers, eyes grave and kind across the table, “then it’s important.”   
  
“You don’t even know me.”  
  
“I know your words.”  
  
“The words—” Chris closes his mouth, shakes his head. “I can’t—I feel so fuckin’—I can’t say this to you, you’re so…”  
  
Sebastian raises eyebrows. Eloquently so. “I trip over chairs. You might’ve noticed.”  
  
“So damn good at everything,” Chris says, “including the chairs, and I—” The dam breaks. The words gush out. He’s telling Sebastian Stan everything: his fears and his hopes and his terror that the words won’t come, he’s only got one book in him, maybe he can never do it again, maybe it’s a fluke and he’s a failure and his readers will hate him, maybe he should stop trying…  
  
His voice cracks a couple times. He hopes he’s not crying. Then again, that’d only add to his list of dismal attributes. Falling apart in front of Sebastian Stan. A second time.  
  
Sebastian lets him talk, listening with long-fingered hands cradling coffee-cup heat, head on one side like a fascinated kitten. Chris eventually winds down and just sort of stops and says, “…I’m so fucking sorry.”  
  
“Don’t be.” Sebastian leans forward, eyes intent. He also winces ever so slightly—if it is a wince; it’s so quick Chris instantly second-guesses his own perception—at the movement, as if something inside’s pinched or exhausted or hurting and being ignored, and Chris doesn’t know how to ask but Sebastian’s already talking. “You love what you do. You love the world, so you try to show it to others. It’s personal for you. Writing.”  
  
“Yeah…I guess…”  
  
“That’s beautiful.” A sip of coffee, a swipe of tongue to gather up stray drops. “You give yourself so openly. I admire that.”  
  
Chris stares at him and those words. The meaningfulness hangs in the air like cinnamon-scented steam.  
  
“I did tell you I’d read your book,” Sebastian says, getting whipped cream on his nose this time.  
  
Chris says, “What if I can’t do it anymore?” That isn’t what he’d meant to say, but it’s the question he’s been afraid to ask. And now it’s here, pulled up out of his soul and laid bare before pale mountain-pool eyes.  
  
“Well,” Sebastian inquires serenely, “what if you can?”  
  
“Um…”  
  
“Here.” The cup of cloud-sculpted sugar-and-spice coffee slides across the table toward him. “Tell me about this.”  
  
“About your coffee.”  
  
“Yes, please.”  
  
Chris looks at the coffee. It gazes back limpidly, dark and light swirls of toasty decoration, expectant.  
  
He looks at Sebastian. Who folds hands together, curious kitten now settled in to observe, and waits.  
  
“Okay. Okay, um…coffee. It comes from…somewhere else, where the hell does coffee come from? Sumatra? Kenya? Someplace with…heat. Grass. Long dry grass and sunlight. Someone grew it, someplace. For someone else to consume.”  
  
Sebastian’s eyes sparkle. “It’s a story about people. About people and the connections. About the taste.”  
  
“—about the taste, because it is about people, yeah. Time. All the centuries of people drinking coffee. The way that it feels—I mean the heat. Whether it’s a Starbucks cup or one of these—” He touches the ceramic mug. Sebastian’s mug. “—we feel the same heat. Warmth inside.”  
  
“Like a home. Like a morning routine, or a first date.”   
  
“Like possibilities. Sometimes with whipped cream.” Chris stops, then. Runs a hand through his hair. Has to laugh. “Okay. Yeah. You’re damn good.”  
  
“I did nothing.” Sebastian reclaims his sugar-foam fantasia. “I asked you a question.”  
  
Chris reaches out, impulsively. Touches his hand. Sebastian looks surprised. “Thank you.”  
  
“You don’t have to thank me.” But those sea-glass eyes drift down with the words: clouds over a tropical ocean, deliberately obscuring any idea of gratitude or obligation.   
  
“Yeah I do.” Chris keeps his hand there. Resting on Sebastian’s, which doesn’t pull away. Could be a friendly gesture. Might be only that. Might be more. “You helped. This did help. So thank you.”  
  
Sebastian hesitates. Nibbles his lower lip. Looks up. Their eyes meet. And that’s it: more. “… _cu plăcere_. You’re welcome.”  
  
“Are you answering me in Romanian? Is that a thing? Because I totally can learn Romanian.”  
  
“Only sometimes. When I’m thinking. Are you trying to hold my hand?”  
  
“I could be,” Chris says honestly. Sebastian’d been the one to mention _first date,_ earlier. Coffee and hope. Possibilities. “If you want that. I sort of do. Want that.”  
  
Sebastian’s smile materializes full-blown out of nowhere, as if startled into being by the admission. “I want that as well.”  
  
Their hands move. Off the coffee cup, onto the table: fingers seeking and finding. Sebastian’s fingers are longer than Chris’s but more slender, cheetah-graceful as the rest of him. Chris memorizes the calluses and softnesses of his skin.  
  
Sebastian turns his wrist slightly, memorizing Chris right back. A thin line of long-healed plainly-old silver-pink winks up from under one pushed-up sweater-sleeve, etched mute and expressive along a vein. Chris’s breath skips. He starts to touch, wanting to ask; but he’s very aware of the fragility of the moment, how easily the spell-bubble might snap with one ill-considered phrase, so he ends up hovering a fingertip a whisker’s-width away.  
  
“Oh.” Sebastian’s followed his gaze. Shrugs, one-shouldered—the other shoulder—and rueful. At peace with it. Accepting. “Learning a new life, in a second new country, was…hard, let’s say. For a few years. I wanted very badly to be like everyone else. I was different. You can; I don’t mind.”  
  
Chris lets out the breath. Rests fingers over once-wounded skin and the life-affirming pulse-beat beneath. “You’re here.”  
  
Those eyes are very blue, and very steady. “I am.”  
  
“I’m glad you’re here.”  
  
“As am I.” Sebastian turns his hand, curls fingers around Chris’s. His fingers’re smiling too. “I won’t say it’s something one ever completely forgets. That’s not true, I suspect. But it’s years ago. I am, as you said, here. And now I’ve met you. Chris Evans.”  
  
I think I love you, Chris wants to say. I think I’ve never met anyone else like you. I think I’m in awe of your talent and your kindness and the way you look at the world and carry scars and smile. You don’t need me, and I think I need you.  
  
He says, while mocha-cinnamon scents waft equably around them, “I still kinda can’t believe you know who I am.” He means that in at least two ways.  
  
Sebastian’s eyes soften like maybe he’s heard both, but what he says is, “Would you like to practice some more? This table. Carved out of an ancient tree-trunk, perhaps…”  
  
“An old pirate ship. Broken up and washed up on the beach.”  
  
“Mythical. Mystical. Very Davy Jones. If you say the right words, spill the right beverage—the sea salt in salted caramel?—a ghost-pirate might appear.”  
  
“So much yes,” Chris agrees. “People keep trying. Nobody’s figured out the right combination yet.”  
  
“Or they have.” Sebastian’s eyes get conspiratorially wider. Flipping through possibilities. “Imagine what you could do if you summoned a ghost-pirate in the middle of a coffee-shop. He might not be very inclined to behave.”  
  
“Or he might fall in love with a cinnamon-spice latte,” Chris finishes, and nudges Sebastian’s cup with his free hand. “Want another one?”  
  
The rain’s building up again outside, wind-whipped scurrying eddies. The drops blow past the windowpane, some of them clinging, intrigued by pirates. Inside the coffee-shop warmth, Sebastian Stan’s smiling, while Chris holds his hand.  
  
“Yes,” Sebastian says. “I would like that.”


	4. you might as well sing along

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which first kisses happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for: mention of Sebastian having an emotionally (not physically) abusive ex, though in the past, and Sebastian did the leaving, in the end.

They hold hands. They hold hands across a coffee table. Chris holds Sebastian’s hand, rubbing his thumb gently over the back of it, playing with articulate fingers in his, and thinks: this is me holding his hand. This is him wanting to hold my hand. Gosh.  
                           
They talk about books, about science fiction, about space and discoveries. Sebastian gets enthralled at the far-off possibility of terraforming Mars; Chris rhapsodizes about the grace and power of the Orion Nebula and hot young massive stars blooming into existence. They both talk about aliens and connections and the transformation of humanity, futures they won’t see but humans somewhere sometime will. The conversation swings from time travel to television shows, interspersed with new coffee deliveries courtesy of the benevolent barista. Sebastian once or twice has to pause to chat with fans who wander into the coffee-shop and spot him. These fans study Chris in a manner reminiscent of Chris’s first-ever girlfriend’s mother. One of them pats Sebastian mournfully on the arm before departing.  
  
Sebastian starts laughing, so much so that he starts coughing. Chris goes from annoyed but amused—he’s the one _with_ Sebastian—to alarmed in record time. “Don’t talk—here, drink your coffee—I can get water if—”  
  
“I’m fine.” Sebastian’s face is pale, though. And his voice sounds like he’s hurting. “I told you I was sick, last week. I did go see a doctor, I’ve been on antibiotics, it’s getting better, it’s just—”  
  
“That you’re on a book tour,” Chris finishes, “making fans adore you, when you should be in bed. Come on, where’re we gonna get the next life-changing gay superhero fantasy romance if you end up in the hospital, where’s your hotel, let me walk you there.”  
  
Sebastian finishes off his cup of sugar and espresso. Swallows, some color coming back into his cheeks with the heat. “You could write it. You’re good enough with emotion; you could certainly make a romance feel real. And you’re taking care of me. The hotel might be a good idea…”  
  
Concession, when Sebastian’d not wanted to go home the day before, at the book-signing. Chris bites his lip so hard he tastes blood, raw and copper-quick. “So you’re saying me taking care of you’s romantic? I can buy you more coffee, too, does that count?”  
  
“That counts.” Sebastian’s smile’s tired but present: tatterdemalion sunshine. “I thought I might ask you, if you’d be interested…I’ll be here until at least tomorrow because of the flooding, and tonight evidently I’ve been volunteered to have dinner with members of the local school board and a Mr Sam Jackson from Samuel Jackson’s Select Academy for Advanced Students, because so many of them read my books—I mean the students, not the school board, though I suppose they might too—”  
  
Chris considers, “Imagine the school board in Captain America uniforms, though,” and rests a thumb unobtrusively over the pulse in Sebastian’s wrist. Counting. Too fast.  
  
“Oh, no.” Sebastian makes a face at him. “Have you _met_ Mr Jackson? Thank you for that visual. I was attempting to ask you out on a date. Which I realize involves local educators and far too many people, but Margarita set it up and I can’t say no. Please come. With me.”  
  
A date. Not a chance meeting in a coffee-shop; not a frantic rescue in a signing line. Sebastian’s asking him out on a date.  
  
Granted, said date involves a prearranged dinner with civic leaders and educational professionals, and Chris’ll blend in about as well as a stegosaurus, but: his heart’s doing cartwheels regardless.  
  
He’s been quiet too long; Sebastian nibbles a lip, looks at the corner of their table, starts to take his hand out of Chris’s. “It’s fine if you say no, I know it’s hardly ideal and you barely know me and—”  
  
“Fucking _yes,_ ” Chris bursts out, “yes, oh God yes, whatever you want, I’ll do whatever you want, please yes,” and he doesn’t feel lumbering or ungainly at all, because Sebastian’s smiling.  
  
“Also,” he adds, “I can maybe take care of you more, you said that was romantic, you did say romantic, you can’t take that back,” and Sebastian laughs, which thrills every atom of Chris’s soul, and also scares him beyond rational expression because the last time Sebastian laughed had ended in breathlessness.  
  
“You and me,” Sebastian says, “we can be romantic together,” and squeezes Chris’s hand. More thrills.  
  
At the very next respite in the scattered rain-eruptions, he coaxes Sebastian out of the clinging arms of the café chair and walks him to his hotel, which is in fact the only real hotel around, slanted New England rooftop teasing the rainclouds above other buildings. It’s two blocks away; Chris suggests getting a cab, but earns himself an eye-roll and an exasperated grumble in Romanian that ends with a switch to English and  “—maybe I meant mother hen, not romantic—” to which Chris says, “You did it for me,” and, heart beating like a jackhammer, puts an arm around slim shoulders.  
  
Sebastian leans into the arm. Tips his head against Chris’s collarbone. Chris wants to cry for no readily explicable reason. Like his nerves’ve started singing, body lit up from the inside, hopelessly fond, needing to keep Sebastian safe always.  
  
Margarita’s waiting in the fireplace-lit autumn-festooned lobby of the hotel, wearing red and faux-fur, tapping fingers on her phone. She starts to say something, looks at Sebastian’s face and the leaning-into-Chris he’s currently doing, gets another worried line between her eyebrows. Sebastian slips out from under Chris’s arm, but their hands find each other and tangle, holding on. “I’ll be all right. I’ll rest. I promise. Meet me here at six-thirty? I have no clue about any dress code.”  
  
“Not formal,” Margarita says, in a tone suggesting that they’ve had clothing-related conversations many times, “I’ve got them to agree to switch venues and come here, the hotel restaurant, so you don’t have to go out, but you should at least wear jeans that don’t look like an invitation to sex.”  
  
Chris tactfully does not comment. He’s been appreciating—and trying not to appreciate, because Sebastian’s still unwell—the way black denim caresses endless legs and temptingly strong thighs.  
  
Sebastian looks down at himself. “I don’t think I brought anything else. Unless you count sweatpants. Can I—”  
  
“No,” his manager says definitively, “you cannot wear sweatpants,” and sighs. “I’ll think of something. Go lie down.”  
  
“You’re a world-famous author,” Chris says, thumb tracing the back of Sebastian’s hand. “You can wear sweatpants to dinner if you want. Or I can, if you want.”  
  
Sebastian laughs. “And here I’d been thinking about dressing up to impress you…”  
  
“I’m impressed.” Chris picks up the hand in his and kisses it, because he _is_ a romantic at heart and maybe it’s a sappy gesture but Sebastian’s eyes get utterly thrilled, like he’s never had anyone be gallant for him before, and so Chris ends up grinning. The large crackling fire throws some sparks in support. “I’m a hundred percent impressed. You said six-thirty?”  
  
“I did, and—”  
  
They’re interrupted. Someone’s flipped on the lobby television. Turned up the sound. Flash flood warnings. Alerts. Incoming winter gales.  
  
Sebastian looks at Chris. Chris mutters, “Yes, I was camping, I should, um, get my—sorry about all the—I mean, you probably hate camping, I’ve got a backpack, I mean a tent, it’s kind of a cool portable tent, never mind, Jeremy called me a mountain man,” and wants to crawl into said tent on the spot and whimper sadly at himself.  
  
“I was only wondering where you’d been staying.” Sebastian squeezes his hand. “I did manage to guess that you’d been out at a campsite.”  
  
“Yeah…kinda…all the mud…sorry again…”  
  
“I’ve never been camping,” Sebastian offers, “but I think I might not mind mud? I do go for walks in the rain? Though mostly in the city…”  
  
That spectacular voice sounds tentative. Apologies under the fairy-tales. It’s at this point that Chris figures out that, as nervous as he himself is about first impressions and city-boy-versus-forest-hermit relationships, Sebastian’s equally so. And is, at the moment, apologizing for not being what he thinks Chris wants. Which is kind of incomprehensible and also a lot of very wrong.  
  
He jumps in too hastily, “I like walks in the rain!” and Sebastian’s gaze stops being quite so tentative and the hotel lobby, drenched in firelight, beams.  
  
The television announces loudly that travel advisories have been issued. Everybody needs to be careful. Stay at home, stay safe, take things slow.   
  
Chris Evans has known Sebastian Stan for two days. Plus a lifetime of stories.   
  
He’s holding Sebastian’s hand in a hotel lobby with fake autumnal leaves festooning the windows and he’s worrying about how pale Sebastian’s lips look and he’s wanting to kiss those lips, to find out whether they’re as soft and full and delicious as they seem, to taste lingering sugar-spice coffee and to make chilly skin ignite under his touch.  
  
He says, “So…I’m gonna go get my stuff and try not to die in a flash flood and then meet you back here and I promise to, like, get a hotel room and shower first? And please rest? I mean you. Not me. I mean—you know what I mean.”  
  
Sebastian nods. Because Sebastian does know what Chris means. Every time. Magical. Chris’s heart wants to expand, encircle the world, leap tall buildings in a single bound. “Let me know when you’re back? Even if you’re early. I’d rather know you haven’t been devoured by storms. Wake me up if you have to.”  
  
“Nope,” Chris and Margarita say simultaneously. Chris is starting to like Sebastian’s manager. More so when she suggests that they exchange phone numbers, which is a wonderful fabulous genius idea that Chris should’ve thought of hours ago instead of staring into Sebastian’s perfect eyes. Sebastian blushes as he gives Chris his number. Chris thinks that Sebastian pink-cheeked with bashful want is the best sight he’s ever seen. Right up there with Sebastian reading his own words aloud, passionate as lightning. Right next to Sebastian smiling at him across nut-scented mugs of heat in a small-town café.   
  
Way better than Sebastian exhausted and racked with a coughing fit, which happens almost immediately after they finish with the phones. Chris puts a hand on his back, determinedly steadying him despite severe internal panic. “Should we call a hospital, or—”  
  
“ _Nu_ …no…I’m fine, it’s getting better…”  
  
“That doesn’t sound better!”  
  
“Better than he was last week,” Margarita observes, collecting her charge’s arm. “When I literally put him in a car and drove him to the hospital, and they said he had walking pneumonia and gave him a week’s worth of antibiotics and prescribed bed rest _which he is about to go enjoy.”_  
  
“I’m so sorry,” Sebastian tries. Mostly a whisper, in the wake of the coughing. “I’ll be fine tonight.”  
  
Chris is skeptical of this fact, but if it’s an arranged event, he’s not going to argue. He knows how ferociously proud a small New England town can be, and if they’ve thrown together a dinner for the stranded visiting famous writer, everyone wants said dinner to go well. He sighs.   
  
Sebastian sighs too. “ _Îmi pare rău._ I’m very sorry. I’m normally more…” He waves a hand. Chris isn’t quite sure what that’s intended to mean. Sebastian’s pretty wondrous as is.   
  
“…I don’t even know,” Sebastian finishes. “Words. Sentences. Actually I’m not. I trip over chairs and I walked into a prop refrigerator when I visited the set where they’re filming the Captain America novels. You write mud and waterfalls into beauty. And you’re very strong. And I like your beard. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore, please tell me I’ve stopped speaking English, you understood none of that.”  
  
“I like that you trip over chairs,” Chris says, “I like catching you,” and gets an arm more firmly around him. Strength. Muscles. Sebastian likes that. Sebastian likes his writing. Sebastian likes _him_.  
  
He sticks like resolute glue to Sebastian’s side on the short journey up the elevator and into the hotel room, which turns out to be one of the nicer—not the nicest, but _nicer_ —options available. Sebastian’d joked at the signing about sharing a room with his manager to save money; Chris eyes the suite and the two bedroom doors and the mini-bar and the explosion of coffee-cups and notebooks and scarves and skinny jeans in various colors, and tries not to wince.  
  
And then he tries even harder. Because when he eases Sebastian into the closest unmade bed, tugging off stylish winter boots, he spots the prescription bottles, plural, on the nightstand.   
  
He can’t read the labels. But his heart sinks down to the toes of his own decidedly _un_ stylish hiking boots regardless.   
  
Margarita’s watching him from the doorway. She knows, and he knows, this isn’t his room. Not his space. Here at one person’s invitation. Here for now.  
  
“—all right,” Sebastian murmurs, evidently not motivated enough to get undressed or open eyes or even move. “Or I will be—Chris?”  
  
“Yeah?”  
  
“I’ll see you later…”  
  
“Yeah,” Chris whispers, and strokes hair away from one closed eye, and leans down to very gently brush a kiss above that eyebrow. Sebastian’s skin feels warm. Flushed. “I’ll come back. I promise.”  
  
“You promise?” Sebastian sounds very young, all at once: tired and small and scared. The long-healed line along his wrist flickers in the room’s non-light as his sweater-sleeve bunches up: one faded silver scar in the dim cool dark. Chris wants to hold him forever.   
  
“I do. I swear. I just have to go rescue my shit—sorry, stuff—from the campsite, so I’m gonna let you rest, and I’ll come right back, okay?”  
  
“ _Da_ ,” Sebastian says, slipping into drowsy Romanian. “Okay. I’ll be here. Said I’d take you to dinner. To the…dinner. Thing. When you get back.”  
  
Chris isn’t sure Sebastian’s up to venturing _anywhere_ , but he says “Sure,” and stands up, away from the bed as slim fingers slide through his, trying not to feel as if that’s some sort of ominous goodbye. Margarita taps her high-heeled foot: he needs to sleep, I can see you like him and he likes you but we don’t know you yet, this is our life and our book tour, please go…  
  
Chris goes. The last glimpse he gets, before the door closes in his face, is of Margarita supporting Sebastian through a swallowed pill and a sip of water.   
  
And he nearly sticks a boot in the door and shoves himself back inside. But he’s the interloper here, the outsider: even if Sebastian’s called him strong and held his hand and asked him out, he’s not a boyfriend or a partner or a significant other. A few cups of coffee and undying attraction. How significant is that?  
  
Sebastian had looked so _drained_. Chris bites his lip again, managing to hit the same spot, which hurts.  
  
The fire’s burning away merrily in the festive lobby. A few guests’ve congregated, chatting. Woodsmoke and East Coast accents and the yelps of wind racing around sturdy walls. The rain’s swung back in to say hello, but it’s not heavy yet, holding off on the big guns. Chris mentally judges distance to his campsite, weighs the value of his collective possessions against the likelihood of himself drowning in an afternoon tempest, and makes a run for it.  
  
He’s got long legs and the hurricane graciously holds off on his behalf. He bundles up his tent, thanks whatever hiking-related deity invented backpacks with internal structure, tosses books and snacks and spare socks into his pack. Particular care with Sebastian’s novels. Wrapped up and made as waterproof as he can; he’ll gladly sacrifice a shirt to keep the Captain America trilogy dry. Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, Sebastian Stan: they all deserve his protection. Whatever he’s got to give.  
  
When he breathes, the air’s crisp as icicles. Palpable cold, tingling in his lungs. He’s here and awake and alive. The world might be unbelievable, dizzying as a fairy-story, but he’s in the story alongside Sebastian, and he’s jumping in with eyes wide open and heart wide open too. He’s nervous as hell—so fast, so unlikely, so improbably—but he’s not scared.  
  
What he is—  
  
Is writing again. Writing bit by bit, sentence by sentence, but: one sentence matters. One word matters. A word for the world.  
  
A world that Sebastian gave back to him, or nudged him toward, or just propped him up long enough to find footing on a path. Sebastian looked at him and told him how good that first book’d been. Words shaping the world, Chris thinks. The right words at the right time. What he’d needed to hear.   
  
He ponders words. Words for blue. Cerulean. Azure. Topaz. Aquamarine. Cobalt and steel and sky. Rivers decorated with giddy sunsparks. A pair of eyes, waiting. And a story beginning to unfold.  
  
He sprints the few miles back to town, or sprints as best he can with unbalanced weight on his back, and skids into the hotel lobby ten seconds before the apocalypse descends. Thunder rattling the windows. Drops crashing off pavement and walls, clanging like hail. The heavens awash with water and light and sound, bone-shaking, reverberating.  
  
Panting, dripping mud and rainwater, carrying his pack, Chris waves at the desk clerk and asks whether they’ve got any spare rooms.  
  
They do, as it happens; nowhere nearly as nice, and nowhere near, Sebastian’s suite. It’s not a huge hotel, but Chris is fairly sure the staff’s suspicious of his yeti-like appearance, judging from his room’s begrudging view of the parking lot and miniscule shower. He can’t exactly argue, though, particularly not once he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. Good _God_.   
  
He can’t go see Sebastian like this, either. Not with the memory of ever so slightly too-hot skin against his lips. There’s currently a leaf stuck in his beard. No.   
  
He does text— _ok I’m back got a hotel room for avoiding hurricanes be right up you ok?—_ and, after a heart-splintering minute of silence, gets back a smiley face followed by a picture: most of Sebastian’s face, sleep-rumpled and half-obscured by a pillow. Chris isn’t sure he’s moved from the spot he’d first curled up into.   
  
_We still on for dinner,_ he sends, _cool if not, you look comfortable, either way I’m good?_  
  
A pause. Typing. Then not typing, as if Sebastian’s thought better of his first reply and deleted it unsent. Then finally words: _If you would rather not please just tell me._  
  
What?  
  
“No,” Chris says aloud, to his phone. The screen shines up at him like a virtual pat on the shoulder, heartening. “No.” _I want to I’ll be up in a sec I swear I just wanted to know if you were ok and also I’m sorry?_  
  
This time Sebastian actually calls. Chris hits accept immediately. Before the phone can even ring. “I’m an idiot,” he leads with, and Sebastian sort of laughs, though it’s partly a sigh. “You’re not. I am. I overreact sometimes. Bruises that shouldn’t be, anymore… You are all right, though? Not swept away by torrential downpours?”  
  
“I’ve got a leaf in my beard,” Chris offers. Salve for those bruises. Maybe. If he can. If that can be his job from now on, he’ll take it gladly. “It’s a nice leaf. Friendly. How’re you feeling, seriously?”  
  
Sebastian yawns. Chris can picture him: pushing himself upright, out of the wistful arms of pillow-fluff and down. Hair mussed from napping, smile soft from dreams. “Better. Tired. We should make an appearance at dinner, at least. And I did ask you to come. Bring your leaf.”  
  
“It wants to meet you. I should kinda shower? And change? And then come over?” He adds, kicking off boots, “It’ll be like twenty minutes, stay in bed, don’t get up until I knock on your door, okay?”  
  
He doesn’t realize how easily that last phrase might be interpreted as an order until he hears the soundless blink of surprise on the other end. He puts a hand over his mouth. Very slowly, tries to cram fingers in there along with the metaphorical foot.  
  
Sebastian says, a hint of amusement in that extraordinary accent, “Yes, Chris.” And, oh—  
  
That’s not amusement.  
  
Or, rather: it is, Sebastian’s entertained by the idea, but. But. Chris’s brain spins in dizzy circles.  
  
Sebastian’s willingly playing along. Not just tolerating the banter, not rolling his eyes—okay, maybe a little—on the other end, but _agreeing_.  
  
“Um,” Chris scrapes out of his tightening throat, jeans rapidly getting tighter too, “um—okay, then? You—stay warm and I’ll be right there and—you said yes—”  
  
“Yes,” Sebastian agrees, “I did. Say yes. To you.” Even more demure. Like he knows precisely what that’s doing to specific areas of Chris’s anatomy on the other end of the line.   
  
“Is that okay?”   
  
“Chris.” Fond, wry, genuine, laced with what Chris’s pretty sure has to be desire. “You heard me say so. And…I should confess…I did say I love your writing. Your voice, your laughter, when you gave those awards acceptance speeches…I may’ve once or twice imagined myself saying yes to you.” It’s Chris’s own imagination that tacks the _sir_ onto the end of that, but not without some heavily implied justification, he thinks, on that side.   
  
“I couldn’t quite believe my eyes,” Sebastian finishes, “when I first saw you in that bookshop, in the middle of the crowd. I thought I’d ended up hallucinating, feverish again, seeing dreams…but then you were real. You are real. I’ll wait for you to come up, but I should get dressed. Can I get up, if I promise to be quick about it and to sit down immediately if I feel lightheaded?”  
  
Chris grips the phone. White-knuckled. “Is that a possibility?”  
  
“I hope not. Though the headache’s not terribly inclined to go away. Maybe I should…” A pause, a rustle: one of those prescription bottles, from the sound. A sip of water, a swallow. “If I end up attempting to climb into your lap and demand that you pet my hair, I apologize in advance. I’ve been told that I can get too—I’m warning you now, in any case.”  
  
“Hey,” Chris says, standing in his hotel room—the room he’s paying for so that he can stay close to Sebastian, flash floods and hurricanes aside—and cradling his phone like the gesture’ll fly across the invisible line to throw arms around the other end, “nothin’ to apologize for on my account, all that sounds kinda good?” and wonders who once told Sebastian words about being too clingy, too attached, too whatever that revealingly unrevealed phrase would’ve been. Sebastian’s the sweetest person Chris knows, which Chris believes as an inarguable _fact_ , and yes he also knows they’ve known each other for about two days.   
  
Those blue eyes should never have to feel unwanted or unwelcome. And anybody gifted with a lapful of affectionate uninhibited Sebastian should be thanking every damn lucky star in the sky, and Chris would greatly enjoy punching the mouth that’d ever said otherwise.  
  
He adds, pitching his tone deliberately low and purposeful and committed, an anchor for that yes if needed, “And yeah. You can start getting ready if you think you need to, but don’t strain yourself, don’t get up too fast if you have a headache, and I want you resting or at least sitting down or, um, something, by the time I get there, clear?”  
  
“Yes.” Sebastian’s smiling; Chris can hear it. “I’ll see you soon.”  
  
“Right. You will. I will. Um. Yeah.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“Um…bye?”  
  
“Do you want me to hang up first? _La revedere._ Goodbye. But not really. I’ll be thinking about you. Did you say you needed to shower?”  
  
“You can’t just say that,” Chris fires back, “and expect me to get off the phone.”  
  
“I’m still in bed,” Sebastian murmurs, “and it’s an extremely large bed…”  
  
Chris starts to answer, remembers _why_ Sebastian’s in bed, stops. He wants to keep going, oh fuck does he want to keep going. But. Those painkillers, that exhaustion. “I want you to know,” he says, “that we’re not stopping because I don’t want to. Or because I don’t want you. I do.”  
  
Sebastian’s quiet. Pitfalls and hidden crevices opening up across the storybook forest floor.   
  
“I _do_ ,” Chris says once more. Emphatically. “Headache, you said. And I know you just took somethin’, and I _know_ it can’t be working _that_ fast, and if—if this is a thing then this is a thing and you said you were listening to me so listen?” And then he holds his breath. Heart rattling his ribs.  
  
Sebastian breathes out. Self-deprecating half-annoyed acceptance: Chris is right and they both know it. “I’m listening.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
“Oh, really…”  
  
“You like it,” Chris observes, “when I say that. You. Good. For me. Listening to me.”  
  
This time Sebastian mutters what’s probably a profanity or two in Romanian, plus: “Yes, I do, it’s too fast and I shouldn’t and after last time I didn’t think I would again and I do. You and the coffee. I’m hanging up now.”  
  
“Sebastian?”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“I’m so fucking happy I made it to that bookshop,” Chris says. “I’m just—happier. Around you.” He is. That’s true. “And I like this, whatever we’re doing, you said you did and I do too.”  
  
There’s a pause, that kind that needs no words to be wholly full, then.  
  
“So,” Chris says, once the moment shifts and tips and grows less poignant, “okay, I’m gonna get off the phone and you’re gonna start getting ready for our date and call me if you need anything, okay? And I want you sitting down as much as possible and not exerting yourself. Don’t even put on shoes. I can do that for you.”  
  
“I’m tempted to make the comment about glass slippers and Prince Charming,” Sebastian observes. “That or I’m wondering about your curious desire to handle my footwear. No, that’s a joke, I trust you. I do, you know. Come up when you’re ready; I’ll be here.”  
  
“Yeah,” Chris says, “me too,” and gets off the phone. Hopes Sebastian heard that the way he meant it: I trust you in turn, you who saved me on a dusty bookshop floor and in a coffee-shop and by giving me your trust to carry now. Thank you. I think I love you, and thank you.  
  
The rain patters cheerfully down across his tiny window. Patterns the parking-lot view in streamers of water and sound. Chris looks at his phone; at his backpack and gear; at the rivulets and rivers of the storm. His battered notebook’s near the top, and dry and safe when his fingers close around it.  
  
By the time he surfaces to check the clock, it’s five-thirty. He swears. Dives into the tiny shower. Spends a minute just standing under the fall of water and heat: not thinking anything, not fretting—though he is, of course: about Sebastian, about dinner tonight, about this date—but only feeling. Steam and the pounding force of the showerhead. Dirt washed from his skin, pooling and swirling down the drain. Cleanliness, as he scrubs bare skin until he turns pink all over. His hair feels good when he runs his hands through it, and he thinks that Sebastian did like his beard and his muscles, and maybe Sebastian will also like his tattoos, Sebastian who’s not afraid to ask Chris out and offer to try camping and hold Chris’s hand in public when they’ve just met; maybe Sebastian will spot the hint of ink at Chris’s collarbone and ask and Chris can tell him stories, which might mean they could end up shirtless…  
  
If Sebastian’s all right. If Sebastian’s not coughing and white-faced and pretending to be fine. If Sebastian’s not _worse_.  
  
No. He tilts his head back into the stream. No. Sebastian and Margarita had both said he was recovering; they’d taken him to a doctor, he’d gotten medication. And Sebastian had been better that morning: smiling in a coffee-shop, getting Chris to think of stories about ghost-pirates and driftwood tables. Sebastian’s just tired. Which happens. On a book tour. When someone’s been ill.  
  
He wants to be there at Sebastian’s side. For dinner tonight; for holding each other in bed; for whatever Sebastian needs, or simply wants, forever.  
  
He flips off the water and hops out of the shower and realizes he’s got nothing to wear.  
  
Ten harried minutes later, he’s flung hiking-appropriate jeans and flannel all over his hotel room, lost and found his left boot, and is still clad only in a too-small towel and the disaster of his hair where he’d run hands through it. He gives up. Calls the front desk. When he explains that he’s having dinner with Sebastian Stan, and no he’s not a crazy person, he actually is having dinner with the famous author, honestly, the girl puts him on hold. Chris thumps his head against the wall.  
  
The girl—Cobie, apparently—comes back, along with three bellboy co-conspirators who’ve apparently seen Chris and Sebastian holding hands in the lobby. They confer. The hotel has internal laundry and dry-cleaning services, and a few items either left behind or easy to sneak out and replace later. Chris resolves to give the staff the biggest tip in the history of tips, even more so when they show up at his door with arms full of slacks and sweaters and even a pair of close-enough shoes.  
  
He ends up in decent pants and a black-and-white button-down and tie under a blue sweater—Sebastian likes blue, and the sweater-shirt combination kind of gives off a sexy teacher vibe, which the helpful bellboys assure him is a good look on him. Chris concedes the point, mostly because maybe if Sebastian likes Chris giving orders then Sebastian might also like the sexy teacher idea. He’s not got a ton of options, anyway.  
  
He runs hands through his hair, checks the beard for stray unaccommodating strands, turns to look at the bellboys. The closest one, whose nametag says Clark, gives him a thumbs-up. Okay. Good enough, then. Not good enough for Sebastian, because Sebastian’s got New York City style and Hollywood producers filming his books and the kind of honest sweet-natured goodheartedness that deserves better than anything Chris’s puppy-clumsy paws can offer. But Chris will try, and keep trying, if Sebastian miraculously wants to try too. Chris can’t do anything other than give his whole damn heart to Sebastian.  
  
He throws money at his life-saving hotel minions, grabs his wallet and room key and phone and that one _other_ item, and bolts for the elevator.  
  
Three floors up, opposite wing, hallway that gets longer as he gets closer and his heart-rate picks up. Sebastian Stan, and a first date. This is him on a date. With Sebastian. Which they’re doing all backwards, dinner following comfort and secure arms and what’d practically been sex over the phone. If Sebastian doesn’t mind doing this backwards, neither does Chris, and if they trip over obstacles they’ll do it together.  
  
He fingers that last item, in his pocket. Hopes it’s not badly wrinkled.  
  
One obstacle becomes audibly present the second he’s outside the door. He lifts a hand to knock. Pauses. An argument’s happening in at least three languages and two shades of exasperation. Only one of these languages is English, but he’s pretty sure he catches his own name. Sebastian’s manager sounds frustrated; Sebastian’s reply’s too low to make out.  
  
Chris shuffles feet. Bites his lip. Eyes the carpet. The carpet ignores him with profound beige placidity.  
  
He checks his watch. Then does so again. Then, before he can think better of it, knocks.  
  
The argument cuts off.   
  
A tap of heels approaches the door. The door flies open. Margarita points a finger at Chris’s face, accuses, “I need to talk to you!” and then yells over her shoulder, “Go back to bed!”  
  
“I’m already up.” Sebastian’s in fact lying on the sofa in the suite’s shared sitting room, one long leg dangling to the floor, the rest of him sprawled over pillows, negligent and careless and lovely and tired. He pushes himself up more to wave at Chris. “Hi, you’re here, you look fucking amazing—”  
  
“Stay. Put,” Margarita admonishes him, and then waves the finger at Chris’s eyes again. “You. We need to talk. Now.”  
  
“Um,” Chris says. “Sure?” It’s hard to think much past the doorknob digging into his back and the irate protectiveness inches from his face. “Sebastian? Help?”  
  
Sebastian says something in Romanian, rapid and plaintive if Chris’s any judge. Margarita’s expression softens a fraction, though she doesn’t step back. “Sebastian, don’t even try. Chris Evans. Listen. He’s my friend. And we don’t know you. Yeah, I looked you up, the book awards, and he trusts you. Which is actually a pretty big mark in your favor, because he doesn’t talk about most people the way he talks about you. But you just kind of showed up at the right time, he’s sick and vulnerable, isn’t he, and the last time he fell in love it ended _bad_ , I was _there_ , I picked up the pieces, and I’m not letting that happen again, not when he’s—”  
  
“If you call me fragile one more fucking time in any language you are so fired,” Sebastian hisses from the couch, “and that’s only mostly me kidding, stop talking in front of Chris, _please_ —”  
  
“Last time,” Margarita says to Chris, “that absolute bastard used to make jokes out of it, out of him: such a dork, my God, you’re lucky you’re famous, I can’t believe anyone actually thinks you’re cool, you should be grateful I put up with you. Except those weren’t jokes. None of them were. And I watched him forget how to smile, day after day, week after week, and I’m _not_ watching that again, so if you’re just here for the fame or the literary connections or rekindling your own dead career or whatever, if you’re not here for _him_ , then get the hell out of our hotel room.”  
  
The words hit home. Dull thuds like arrows into flesh. Not for the reasons she thinks, though; Chris darts his gaze past her and toward blue eyes where they’re huddled on the sofa. “Seb—”  
  
“I’m not fucking helpless,” Sebastian snaps, and scrubs both hands over his face, through his hair. Looks up, but then shuts his eyes. Fingertips rubbing his left temple. “I ended it. _I_ left _him_. Over a year ago. I knew it wasn’t good—I just couldn’t—I know I’m not what anyone—it doesn’t matter. Margarita, please. Thank you, I know you wanted to help, but—please go.”  
  
“You wouldn’t’ve told him,” she says. “Or you would’ve apologized for it. It’s _not your fault,_ Sebastian.”  
  
Sebastian opens his eyes and kind of looks like he wants to argue, but doesn’t, shoulders slumping in defeat; and Chris remembers how to talk instead of being gut-punched by revelations of emotional abuse and says, “I brought you something.”  
  
Everyone in the room, including the sofa, swivels gazes to him.  
  
Chris takes steps over to the couch. To Sebastian’s side. To a spot on the floor, where he kneels down, knight to liege lord, and fishes that paper out of his pocket.   
  
Sebastian takes it. With fingers that shake, though the emotion’s battled into submission and barely noticeable.  
  
“Um,” Chris says, “you liked that there was a leaf in my beard?”  
  
Sebastian laughs, though it’s more of an abrupt broken hiccup of sound. Other hand over his mouth.  
  
The sketch, done in speedy ink on a torn-out sheet from Chris’s notebook, is of Sebastian himself: not full-on, but in profile, the way he’d been sitting by the window of the coffee-shop; Chris had taken that moment and turned it into ivy, flowers, raindrops, an enchanted cottage-window. An old-fashioned quill-pen in Sebastian’s hand. Steam wafting up from a whipped-cream mug of coffee. A tiny Captain America holding the Winter Soldier’s hand, perched on one of the big floppy flower-petals in the lower left corner, both of them smiling at the author who’d given them life.   
  
Sebastian tries to say something behind the astounded hand. Gives up. Eyes huge.   
  
Chris reaches over, takes that hand, tugs it into his. Sebastian swallows, gaze searching his face. Chris smiles a little, tips his head, squeezes fingers in his. Sebastian blinks back tears, and nods.  
  
“So,” Margarita says, “I have no clue what the leaf thing is about, and I’m not sure I want to,” but she touches Chris’s shoulder very lightly, and then goes off to make phone calls regarding upcoming train travel and flooded areas and rescheduled tour stops.  
  
“Chris,” Sebastian whispers. Tremulous, bewildered, raw and painful.   
  
“Hey,” Chris says, getting up to sit beside him on the couch-cushions, continuing to hold his hand, holding on always, “told you I was happy, you make me remember how to make art, you make me _want_ to make art, can I come with you to dinner and be your plus one and scandalize people by, what was it, getting you to sit on my lap so I can pet your hair in public?”  
  
“Oh my God,” Sebastian says, laughing now through unfallen tears, “I did say that, didn’t I, fuck, thank you, thank you, Chris—”  
  
“How’s your headache?” He skims fingertips over that left temple. The place Sebastian’d been rubbing earlier. “Any better?”  
  
“Now.” Sebastian’s smile’s radiant. “Yes.”  
  
“You look pretty fucking amazing yourself, y’know.” Sebastian does: jeans again, but dressy ones, dark and neat and elegant, and a waistcoat, of all things, which should by the laws of conventional physics look unbearably hipster but instead shows off the lean enticing lines of his body in ways that make Chris want to strip every stitch of fabric right off and pin him down on the convenient sofa. His hair’s attractively messy in a way that Chris’s own can never hope to achieve, and he’s gazing up into Chris’s face like he’s found the heart of eternity. Chris’s body and soul throb with adoration.  
  
“I honestly didn’t bring anything but jeans,” Sebastian murmurs, “you’ve done better than I have, I think…” and when Chris admits, “Come on, I borrowed these,” the words aren’t just words. Hanging crystals in the night. Hanging promises like strings of gemstones, spelling out a possible future.  
  
Sebastian takes the sketch and tucks it carefully in between pages of his own notebook, lying closed on the table. He’s not wearing shoes, Chris notes: sock-toes peek out from his jeans, endearingly young and innocent. “I don’t have anything for you, I’m sorry…I never could draw…I could try to write you a story. Our pirates. Ghosts. Tell me what you’d like in a story. Please.”  
  
“You,” Chris says. Cupping his cheek, trailing a thumb over soft skin. “I just want you.” Not the fame, not the Hollywood film adaptations, not the stinging accusations Margarita’d thrown his way. Understandable ones; the storm lashes the windowpanes to underscore the point. But wrong.  
  
Sebastian closes his eyes briefly. His eyelashes are long. They tickle Chris’s skin. “A romance. A first kiss?”  
  
“Hell yes,” Chris whispers, and leans in.  
  
Sebastian tastes like salt and sugar and kindness. Like ocean waves, if oceans had a moment ago wept from love. Sebastian kisses like generosity and heat: opening up readily, invitingly, teasing Chris to come deeper, to lick and nibble and explore the curve of a lower lip, the flick of a tongue. When Chris accepts the invitation and plunders a bit more assertively, Sebastian makes a delicious yielding little sound and tips his head back, melting into Chris’s hands.  
  
When Chris pulls away at last, they’re both breathing swiftly. Sebastian’s eyes’re dark. Onyx bliss clouding blue.  
  
“Hey.” Chris touches his cheek, his lips. Sebastian kisses his fingers, but then focuses a bit more, coming back. Chris asks, in the wake of the scorching moment, “So, um, dinner, or just stay up here and more kissing?”  
  
“ _Rahat_ ,” Sebastian mutters, without bothering to translate. Chris can guess; it’s likely about his own sentiment on the subject. “We should…I promised, I _did_ promise…but…”  
  
“Fastest dinner ever?”  
  
“I am so very glad you were camping here.” Sebastian sits obediently in place while Chris finds his shoes and—as established—eases them onto his feet. Making sure blue eyes don’t have to bend over or get lightheaded. Yes. “And that I took this route on the book tour, instead of another. And then the rain…it is a story, perhaps. Meant to be. Fate. Or—how do you feel about dreadful puns?”  
  
“I,” Chris announces, big hands cradling Sebastian’s right ankle, memorizing the knot of bone, the muscles of that calf, “feel excellent about dreadful puns.”  
  
“Well…”  
  
“Nope, now you have to.” He taps fingers over the ankle in his grip. “Go on.”  
  
“I did say fate. I could’ve said kismet. Or…Chris-met? I’m so sorry. Pretend I didn’t. I’m sorry—”  
  
Chris stares at him, declares, “That is a fucking _terrible_ pun, you’re fucking _perfect_ , come here,” and yanks him into another kiss.  
  
This second kiss isn’t better than the first—nothing’s beating that first time—but it’s more full of laughter and also Sebastian toppling off the sofa into Chris’s waiting arms, so it’s absolutely equally as good. And that’s perfect too.


	5. not a damn thing will go wrong

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which sex happens. (Also, storms, literature, and Sebastian semi-accidentally taking too many painkillers...)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for, well, the things in the summary: sex, D/s undertones, and Sebastian trying to make the headache go away by using prescriptions irresponsibly, though this is more of a one-time thing, not recurring behavior.

They do eventually get up off the floor and out the door and off to dinner. Only five minutes late, and Chris straightens Sebastian’s waistcoat and Sebastian kisses the corner of Chris’s mouth, and the stormy weather clamors against the hotel walls in celebration. In the elevator, Chris puts both arms around him, discovering anew that they’re nearly the same height and finding too many reasons to marvel at that: at the way curving lips wait at just the right spot to be kissed, at the neatness with which their hips and shoulders align. Sebastian turns into Chris’s space like he’s been waiting for only that all his life. Chris kisses his forehead, and knows that for his own part he has been.  
  
Sebastian does say, not exactly out of nowhere, as they’re passing the fifth floor, “I would’ve told you. She was wrong about that much. I won’t say I wouldn’t’ve apologized. I honestly don’t know.”  
  
Chris needs a second to parse all the double negatives, but then nods. Holds on more purposefully.   
  
Sebastian’s _not_ perfect. Sebastian, like Chris, has splintered edges, jagged parts. Sebastian’s the person who saved Chris in a damp blue tent with shining prose, and the man who stayed by Chris when the claws of anxiety were scratching cruel and red; Sebastian’s too good at emotion and too determined to be good enough for everyone else to love, even when sick and coughing and feverish or wounded deep down inside, hurt so very badly he’s forgotten how to smile. There’re scars and stories and healing that’s a work in progress: learning when to not apologize for what’s been done to him in the past.   
  
Chris has scars and stories too. Hell, Sebastian’s seen those scars firsthand. Up close and dramatically personal.   
  
And so maybe it’s not about Sebastian rescuing him, a beacon of guiding light for Chris’s panic to cling to; maybe it’s not about Chris falling into Sebastian’s book tour like a flannel-clad Prince Charming and helping him remember to laugh at his own awful puns. Maybe it’s just about them, and broken pieces that fit into matching uneven spaces, set to the cadence of falling rain.  
  
He kisses the top of Sebastian’s head, thinking nothing in particular, thinking: yes. Sebastian considers this, then ducks his head just enough to nestle in between Chris’s chin and shoulder, content.  
  
The elevator lets out a merry _ding!_ Punctuation for the moment. They’ve arrived. Together.  
  
The restaurant staff wave them over. The restaurant’s welcoming in that indomitable New England colonial way: heritage pride mingled with vague suspicion of outsiders and independence of spirit. There’re eclectic scrimshaw carvings and local landscapes livening up the walls. The tables are solid oak, and aware of it. Lots of chowder and baked beans and cream pies on the menu. Sebastian looks mildly overwhelmed by the dessert options. Chris leans in and notes, “You do like chocolate…”  
  
“Is there cream in everything? Soup, pies, potatoes…I’m not complaining, mind you. Hello,” Sebastian adds, as several large men come over to shake his hand. “Sebastian Stan and Chris Evans, authors. Chris can draw; I can’t. How’re you?”  
  
The men look nonplussed at this. Chris bites his cheek to keep from laughing. They’re gracious, even if Sebastian’s not quite what’s expected; and they commiserate about the rain and congratulate him about New York Times bestseller status, and mostly leave Chris out of the conversation over pre-dinner drinks.  
  
Chris doesn’t mind. Easier to not have to turn on stressful social charm; easier to keep an eye on Sebastian. Who isn’t coughing, which is good, but obviously—obvious to Chris, at least—had been stretching the truth if not outright lying about his headache being better. Little creases around his eyes. Weariness in the bright smile. The smile’s true and not manufactured: Sebastian loves talking about his characters, and jumps headfirst into a debate about the reading practices of young adults—arguing for younger readers as literate, sensitive, and discerning, which seems to startle the man who’d made the flippant comment—with gratifying enthusiasm. Sebastian’s not always the most articulate, tripping over words and making after-the-fact grimaces at his own vocabulary choices, but he’s passionate and animated and beautiful when making a point. Chris holds his hand under the table and contributes when he can.   
  
This is himself holding Sebastian Stan’s hand under a table, at a dinner with school board and elected officials. Like furtive schoolboys in love. He nudges Sebastian’s foot with his own. Sebastian accidentally knocks his fork off the table, which might be the usual clumsiness, but isn’t. They both know.  
  
Some people’re missing. That New England storm. Sleet and burgeoning lakes across town streets. Nobody wants to venture outside, and in fact the television—muttering lowly from the hotel lobby, watched by a few employees—suggests staying indoors, having emergency supplies, getting prepared for record water levels. Night descends, dour and obsidian and saturated with rain.  
  
Dinner’s nevertheless longer than expected, food and wine materializing up and down the table. While some of the school board’s well-informed and thoughtful about education and the encouragement of literacy and literature—Sam Jackson, head of that select private academy, makes some good points about future-oriented citizenry and having a well-informed populace, and grins at Sebastian when elaborating on the power of science fiction—some of them are the opposite. Some of them are fans, and gush relentlessly at Sebastian while evidently missing the point of the novels; one woman asks whether he truly believes that Steve Rogers could be an ideal patriot without supporting the American government uncritically. Chris cringes on Sebastian’s behalf. Sebastian answers patiently that patriotism’s different from blind adherence to the powers that be, and then has to put up with another man claiming to admire Steve Rogers wholeheartedly—“but tell me, kid, he ain’t actually sleeping with Barnes, right? Just the loyalty of two soldiers, men in the field, I mean, Captain America and his buddy Bucky, that’s why you wrote the Peggy Carter character in, am I right?”  
  
Sebastian opens his mouth. Winces. A streak of pain behind those eyes. Chris jumps in with, “Steve Rogers isn’t gay—” which gets Sebastian to whip around and stare at him, betrayed. “—Steve Rogers is bisexual, come on, he’s in love with both Peggy _and_ Bucky, who says you can’t have both, it’s right there in the book,” and Sebastian relaxes beside him.  
  
“Well,” the man huffs, and eyes the closeness of their shoulders across the table, and stops there.   
  
Sebastian smiles at Chris. Chris smiles right back. The low-hanging lamps, red and gold in their muted glass shades, throw light around the room.  
  
Chris takes a sip of his beer. Steadying nerves, not that he needs alcohol when Sebastian’s smiling.  
  
Because he’s mid-sip, he almost misses the movement of Sebastian’s hand. Fingers in pocket. Fingers out of pocket. Fingers flickering over lips, and a swallow of water.  
  
He feels his eyes narrow. Sebastian’s not quite looking at him, but does in the next heartbeat, eyebrows drawing together. Because Chris’s grip on his other hand’s gotten a lot tighter now.  
  
Sebastian shakes his head minutely. Chris glares. The woman across the table twitters, “Have you gotten to see any of the film production, can you give us any gossip from the set, any juicy details?” Sebastian traces a heart over the back of Chris’s hand, and answers.  
  
Chris watches. And notices the shift, about fifteen minutes later. More caution in movements. Measured care. Slowness, as if Sebastian’s having to think very hard about picking up that water glass. As if Sebastian’s sleepy and aware of it, or intoxicated and trying to not show as much, or…  
  
…taking drugs.  
  
Of course he is. Prescription, but that’s at least two this evening alone. And drinking. Not a lot—Chris frantically fishes through memories; no, only one blueberry-chocolate martini, slyly made to last throughout the meal—but that can’t be a good idea. Fuck. _Fuck_.  
  
He gives up on subtle. Puts a hand on Sebastian’s shoulder. “Sebastian? Baby?” This appellation prompts the homophobic councilman to puff up indignantly over his berry tart; Sebastian blinks in uncoordinated bafflement, which is exactly the wrong response to this test of endearments they’ve not yet begun to use. Chris runs through a whole string of blasphemies in his head. “Hey, come on, look at me. You’re lookin’ kinda tired, kid.” With fingers coaxing that chin up, trying to make hazy sea-spray eyes land on his. “Want to go?”  
  
Sebastian blinks again. “Kid…?”  
  
“So precious,” chirps another interchangeable dinner guest, “the two of you, just adorable how much you love each other, and so brave about it, out in public, too!”  
  
“It’s not brave,” Sebastian says, looking confused. “I love Chris. I don’t care who knows.”  
  
Chris slams his mouth shut on the _you WHAT???_ before it can dart out across a dinner table, and instead opts for, “Sorry, he’s been pretty under the weather, he wanted to be here tonight, he kinda insisted, sorry again, but we should probably—”  
  
“Oh, of course,” the chirpy woman agrees, but she also gets up and flutters around them and makes sure they get to the elevators okay and gets a look of real concern when she’s telling Chris to take care of his boyfriend, and Chris ends up kind of touched by and grateful for the caring.  
  
In the protective metal box of the elevator, he steadies Sebastian with one hand and checks his pulse with the other. Too hard to tell. Losing count. Chris’s heart’s echoing the thunder outside.  
  
“Chris?” Sebastian reaches up and takes Chris’s hand, effectively tipsily interfering with pulse-taking efforts. “What’s wrong?”  
  
“You—what did you—what the fuck’re you on?” He tilts Sebastian’s head for better lighting as the elevator creaks upward. Trying to gauge the size of incriminating pupils. “How many? Where’s the bottle?”  
  
“Oh.” Sebastian shakes his head too fast, makes a face, leans into Chris’s hand. “Back in the room. Only two. Well, and the one earlier. But that was at least…some amount of hours ago…are you mad at me?”  
  
“Yes.” He’s rubbing a thumb slowly over that cheekbone, memorizing the feel of breath against the heel of his hand. “No. Maybe a little. How long’ve you been doing this to yourself?”  
  
“I haven’t!” Sebastian protests, eyes wide and guileless. “I’m not—I don’t, I take them when I need to, it’s just been these last few weeks, after I got sick and everything hurt and my head kept hurting after they put me on drugs and they said it’d get better and it has, I swear, I only have maybe a couple days left—”  
  
“Yeah, and how many are you supposed to take in a day?”  
  
“I’m not addicted, if that’s what you’re asking.” Now that accent sounds frustrated; good, Chris’ll take irritation and open eyes over Sebastian overdosing in his arms any day. “I brought two to dinner because it wasn’t getting any better and I needed to be okay—”  
  
“This is _not_ you fucking being okay!”  
  
“I needed to be okay,” Sebastian finishes, “for dinner, for you—I just wanted to make it not hurt, I wanted to be good for you, for our first date, and for—for everyone at dinner…” His eyes’ve gotten more unhappy. Tragedy in mountain rivers. Shattered sunsparks over stone. “And now you’re mad at me and I know it’s my fault and I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—I was just trying to—Chris, I’m so sorry…” His voice quivers. Crumples under the weight of tears. And he tries to step away, as if there’s any space in the hotel elevator, as if he thinks Chris wants space between them right now.  
  
Horrified, Chris catches his hand. Sebastian stumbles. Drugs, or possibly only that familiar baby-deer wobbliness on too-long legs; Chris’s stomach flips.   
  
“I’m so sorry,” Sebastian whispers again, gaze directed at Chris’s feet, miserable.  
  
Chris takes a breath, counts down from three. Lets it go. The elevator hums. Two floors left. The space isn’t silent; it’s made of machinery, lifts and pulleys and movement around them.  
  
He says, “I know,” and reels Sebastian back in, cradling him close. “I know you are, baby, shhh, it’s okay. It’ll be okay.”  
  
“You’re angry with me,” Sebastian says, very tiny, into Chris’s chest.  
  
“No, I’m not.” He hunts for clear enough language. Runs a hand over remorseful dark hair. “I know why you did it, I know you were trying to be good, to make it a good night, to be good enough, I get it. I’m not mad at you, Sebastian, I swear. I’m scared and I hate that you didn’t tell me you were hurting that bad and I need you to show me what you took when we get back to the room, but I’m not mad, I’m worried, okay?”  
  
Sebastian stretches a hand up. Pats Chris on the cheek. Comforting. “I don’t want you to be scared. I didn’t want you to be—that was why. You shouldn’t have to be scared. Only happy. Please.”  
  
“I don’t think it works that way,” Chris sighs, and kisses the hand. “You can’t make me happy by not tellin’ me shit, baby, okay? Please tell me. I wanna know.”  
  
“Baby,” Sebastian echoes bemusedly. “Is that…are you…is that me?”  
  
“That’s what you got from that? Yeah, maybe. You are, right? You know you are.” He meets Sebastian’s eyes. Might be focusing a bit better. Fractionally. “You wanted to be good for me. You don’t have to try. You already are. So good. Sweetest kid on the whole damn planet, and my good boy.”  
  
Sebastian breathes in. Not quite a gasp: an astonished small catch of air and sound. Then nods, eyes like saucers: blue-black and enormous and ready to be kept from shattering, given over into the strength of Chris’s hands.  
  
“Okay,” Chris says, and keeps arms around him, a fortress of muscle and bone and mutual support, until the elevator heralds their arrival. “Okay. We’re okay.”  
  
Out in the hallway, he can hear the hurricane exploding. Gale-force. Rain lashes the windows and walls. It sounds as hard as hail; he imagines balls of ice and rock hurtling through the town, crashing into their café’s vulnerable windows, ripping leaves off trees. He increases his grip on Sebastian, just in case the floor decides to fall out from under them.  
  
The floor stays put and the old bones of the hotel hold up. Sebastian even finds his own room key before Chris can ask. Chris suspects that this is more of that tragic apology, but isn’t sure enough to bring it up. He takes the key, and kisses parted lips. Sebastian kisses back, seeming somewhat reassured by this evidence of lack of anger. But his lips feel cold.  
  
There’s a note sitting out on the coffee table. It’s from Margarita, and declares, _Either your phones are off or there’s no reception anywhere in this town. I’m getting my own hotel room because I don’t want to hear anything you two get up to, and also there are condoms under this paper, Sebastian, because I know you don’t have any, and you owe me SO MUCH for this._ Followed by, in forbidding capitals, _EVANS, HURT HIM AND I’LL TURN YOUR SKIN INTO MY NEXT PAIR OF BOOTS._  
  
Chris stares at this graphic collision of thoughtful foresight and ominous threat. Sebastian puts arms around his waist, reading over his shoulder. “Very inventive, my manager…”  
  
“Very terrifying. _You_ sit down. No, wait, come here. Now sit down.”  
  
“In bed?”  
  
“Not for that! Fuck. No. You’re all—can you even—I’m not going to have sex with you when you’re like half conscious!”  
  
“Eighty percent, at least…on the positive side, the headache’s gone. Are you looking for the bottle? Other table. Both. One’s just the end of the antibiotics. One more of those.”  
  
Chris lunges that way. Reads. Acetaminophen and hydrocodone; could be worse, but not good, especially not three times the prescription dose. Dizziness and lightheadedness common side effects. Possible drowsiness. Okay. Seek help if shallow or difficult breathing. He throws a glance at Sebastian, who’s presently having difficulty with his shoes. Comes over to assist.  
  
Sebastian lets Chris strip off his shoes and socks and ease him down into bed. No commentary this time, even when Chris plops terrifiedly down beside him.   
  
He watches the rise and fall of Sebastian’s chest. How shallow is shallow, anyway? What does that even mean, who the fuck wrote those instructions, why doesn’t he know more about overdoses, should he call a hospital now just to be sure, what if—  
  
“Chris,” Sebastian interjects. Talking. Alive. “I’m fine. Somewhat fuzzy, but fine.”  
  
“Fuzzy?”  
  
“Woolly edges around everything…and my hands’re cold…but I think I’m okay. I’m sitting up, I’m talking to you, I’m all right. Do you think this is what sheep feel like?”  
  
_“Huh?”_  
  
“Woolly edges?”  
  
“You’re not helping me not be scared.” Chris takes both chilly hands when offered to him. They do feel cold. Too damn cold. He rubs them between his. “What do you need? What can I do? Just tell me.”  
  
“I don’t exactly know.” Sebastian’s fingers lie lax in Chris’s. Pliable. Not moving. “I’m awfully tired, though.”  
  
“I don’t,” Chris says, “think you should fall asleep,” and kicks off his own shoes. Twin thuds across hotel carpet. “I’m getting you water. And maybe more food. Do you have any food?”  
  
“I’m not even hungry…”  
  
“I know.” Food might help cushion the effects, though. Worth the attempt. Anything, everything. “I want you to try, okay? For me? Do you have anything to eat around here?”  
  
“Oh…trail mix? I think? In one of the bags.” A handwave, not at any bag in particular. “We didn’t expect to be staying in town; we never went shopping, but we always pack something for travel…no, other bag, the one with the books…the _other_ one with the books…sorry.”  
  
Chris straightens up, trail mix in hand, and demands, “Sebastian? Wake up!”  
  
“ ’m awake…”   
  
“Like hell you are. Sit up for me. You can, just like that, come on…” He’s grabbed the bottled water from the mini-bar. Expensive, sure, but he doesn’t much care. He supports Sebastian’s head against his shoulder. Holds the bottle to colorless lips. Sebastian swallows, and Chris pauses to let him breathe, and they do it again.  
  
“Good,” Chris tells him, arms around him in the giant bed with the universe fretting itself to pieces outside, alone in the eye of the storm. “You’re doing good, you’re doing great, you’re so good for me, you’re awesome, got it? I want you to try to eat something.” He’s not thinking about the other words Sebastian said, over a dinner table, downstairs. He can’t think about that yet. It’s too big and there’s no room. One life-altering moment at a time. Holding Sebastian first. And then—  
  
And then, if Sebastian meant it, if Sebastian even meant it, if Sebastian knew what he was saying—  
  
Chris _is_ in love. Chris has been in love since the first word on the first page, the first glimpse of grey scarf and long legs in a bookstore, the first touch of hand to hand and the scent of winter-spiced coffee.  
  
Sebastian’s trail mix has M&Ms and dried berries and sweetness colonizing the base layer of nuts and granola. Of course it does. Chris has to squeeze his eyes shut to lock away tears.   
  
He feeds Sebastian bits of chocolate. Nuts. Protein. Sebastian nibbles small bites from Chris’s fingers, propped up by pillows and Chris’s body and the stoic wooden headboard. He must be able to feel Chris’s heart hammering away; Chris can feel the frightened thumps down in his toes, so surely Sebastian can too. More food. More sips of water. Rubbing gently over his temple, the base of his skull, places that’d hurt so very badly earlier. Kisses, light and undemanding, scattered on an eyebrow, a nose-tip, that lovely mouth. Chris is here and Sebastian’s here and neither one of them’s going anywhere. Not if Chris has anything to say about it.  
  
Sebastian starts looking a bit better after some uncounted agonizing time. More color in his cheeks. More alertness in those remarkable eyes. Chris traces the line of his lips with an index finger. “How’re you feeling?”  
  
“Less fuzzy, more cold.” Sebastian manages to move on his own, nestling closer to Chris’s body heat. Chris sets the water on the bedside table and puts that arm around him too. “Certainly more present. I’ll admit that it was stupid, now, if you’d like. I’m so sorry.”  
  
“Don’t do it again.” He runs his hand over Sebastian’s head, remembering jokes about hair-petting and affection; he’s not angry as much as he’s grateful, ebbing fear and newborn relief pulling at his bones. “If you, y’know. If we’re doing…what you said, about saying yes…not an order, I don’t even know what that means, but…”  
  
“We’ll learn.” Sebastian stretches, sighs, practically purrs: weary and boneless and contented as a kitten under the petting. “Honestly, it wasn’t just the pills; I’ve been so tired…oh, _mulţumesc_ , thank you, that feels divine…”  
  
“I think you mean you feel divine.” He’s playing with Sebastian’s hair, coiling it around fingers, basking in the softness and the way he’s allowed to know it. “Just kind of everything, catching up with you? Of course it hit you that hard, you’ve been running around on trains and taking care of me, you can’t do everything, baby, you’re not Captain America.” I love you, I love you.  
  
“Mmm. You, on the other hand, might be. I could see you as Steve Rogers. Stepping in to save people you don’t even know, defending characters against people who don’t believe in bisexuality, making friends with puppies…”  
  
“Puppies?”  
  
Sebastian conjures up a smile. This more than anything else helps the world teeter back towards equilibrium. “I’m guessing, but you seem like the type. I’ve never had a dog, but I like them.”  
  
“I miss my dog,” Chris admits. “Big happy bulldog, had him since he was a puppy, his name was East…just old age, last year, and I kinda never felt like getting another dog, y’know? Couldn’t do it. Too soon.”  
  
“We never…” Sebastian hesitates, though more for shaping thoughts, Chris decides, than editing them. “Back in Romania we didn’t…pets weren’t…you might feed a stray, but you wouldn’t take it in, no one had that sort of luxury…and we didn’t have any room in Vienna, barely enough for us. And then in America there was too much to do, too much to figure out, and later on my stepfather got sick and…but I always thought it would be nice. To have a friend.”  
  
“Yeah,” Chris agrees, voice unaccountably hoarse. Sebastian’s shirtsleeves’re pushed up, and the pale traceries of veins stand out in golden bedroom light. “Well. If you. If we ever. I’m not sayin’ I’m even thinkin’ about it, but…dogs are nice.” And as he says the words some long-open loneliness closes over, deep down in a hushed dim corner of his heart, and leaves him less abandoned and more whole.  
  
The lights flicker, sudden static. He glances over as if that’ll provide any clue; they wink out and on a second time, but then remain, electric and calm. Sebastian makes a soft sound and reaches for him, arm around Chris’s waist, pulling him close. They lie face to face in the bed, hearts beating.  
  
Chris brings his hand back up to stroke dark hair, tucking a strand behind Sebastian’s ear. Sebastian smiles, private and luminous. Chris’s body shivers to attention, drawn to that smile. He internally shouts at himself and his uninvited arousal: not the time, not the _time_ , Sebastian’s coming down from a massive drug-induced high and exhausted and in his arms for safekeeping, not ravenous animal lust…  
  
Sebastian shifts hips. Rocking experimentally into his. Sebastian’s half-hard already, and stiffening more as the line of his cock rubs along Chris’s, through jeans and dress slacks.  
  
Chris breathes, “Oh,” though he’s not certain sound’s left his lips. “You…you want…are you…”  
  
“I want you.” Those eyes’re very clear: worn out, yes, and languid with fading opiates, but completely cognizant of choice. “I want all of you. I want to know how you feel, and I want to be yours. Chris. Please. I already am. So make me feel it. I’m here and you’re taking care of me, you’ll make it good, I trust you, please.”  
  
“You trust me that much.” He brings their lips together, breathes, “You want to say yes to me,” over intimate skin. Making Sebastian taste the words. Sebastian’s next inhale stutters and skips over the yes, the nod.  
  
“Okay,” Chris concedes, because he _is_ convinced, Sebastian does want him, Sebastian knows what they’re saying and is watching Chris’s face for the reply. “Okay. You know I want that. I want you, baby, okay? My sweet boy. But we need a couple of ground rules, yeah?”  
  
Sebastian’s eyes get even bigger, at that.  
  
“Not for that,” Chris rapidly clarifies, “or, um, not tonight, not that I even know what—I’m gonna do a hell of a lot more research if we’re doing that. But for now, I don’t want to do anything that’s too much for you, and I don’t want to hurt you, and also it’s sort of still our first date—”  
  
“Oh fuck,” Sebastian says, having plainly also just realized this.  
  
“I want you,” Chris says. “Pretty much every single fuckin’ way anyone can ever think of. I want you to know that.” I love you, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if Sebastian doesn’t remember saying it, doesn’t say it back.  
  
“Yes? I mean yes for me as well. About you.”  
  
“Yeah…” He rolls Sebastian over onto his back amid pillows and snowdrift cotton sheets. Sebastian goes easily, wanting to be wherever Chris puts him. “So fuckin’ beautiful. —so I want you to listen, and tell me if you agree to this, okay? First, we go slow. We stop whenever you say so, wherever you feel like it’s enough, you’re in charge, got it?”  
  
“But…” Sebastian bites his lip. Perplexed. “But…yes, I’m not objecting, but…you know I want…”  
  
“I know what you want, baby.” He walks a hand over to Sebastian’s belt. Flicks it open. Rests the weight of his palm over the zipper of jeans. Feels the twitch of heat under his hand. “I know. But I need to know you’re okay. So that’s part two, you tell me if you don’t feel okay, if you can’t breathe or you’re getting dizzy or that headache’s coming back, and I don’t mean wait until you can’t handle it anymore, I mean tell me the second you think something’s not right, clear?” He doesn’t mean to make the end come out so harsh, so sharp. Fear returning like a boomerang: the knowledge that Sebastian hadn’t told him once already.  
  
But Sebastian nods, honest contrition and fondness in those extraordinary eyes. “ _Da_. I am sorry, Chris.”  
  
“I know. I trust you, too. Just making sure you know. I want to know. Sit up for a sec?” He’s tugging at Sebastian’s fashionable waistcoat; Sebastian gets the message instantly, and sits up long enough for Chris to peel off layers of fabric, shirt and undershirt and all.   
  
Chris’s mouth falls open. Sebastian’s exquisite: lean honed muscle, slim waist, delectable little pert nipples, the faintest dusting of dark hair below his belly button…  
  
Sebastian blushes. Pink under pale gold skin. “I’m not…I do go to the gym, but I’ve been on this book tour and…will you stop staring, please…”  
  
“You have _no idea_ how much that answer is no,” Chris retorts, and shoves him down into the pillows and proceeds to discover the closest inviting nipple with lips and teeth and tongue, until Sebastian’s arching up into his mouth, whimpering his name. Chris takes pity on him and trails kisses lower instead, letting his beard scrape across the flat planes of Sebastian’s stomach, nuzzling until Sebastian squirms and sobs and swears in Romanian. Chris stops. “Good? Bad? Talk to me.”  
  
“Don’t _stop_ —!”  
  
“Good to know.” Chris pauses regardless, balanced atop him, to grin. Sebastian, panting—not badly—grins back. The wind howls through the night; thunder booms.   
  
Sebastian’s eyes light up even more, and one mischievous hand sneaks over to tap at Chris’s sweater. Chris laughs, captures the hand, kisses it, pins it to the pillow. “You want me shirtless? Just ask.”  
  
“I want you _naked_.”  
  
Chris raises eyebrows.  
  
“Fine.” Sebastian sighs melodramatically. “Slow. If I don’t perish of old age.”  
  
“You,” Chris starts, and then bites his lip. “Don’t.”  
  
Sebastian’s expression changes. Comprehension. “Chris. All right, it’s okay, slow. I won’t push. I promise.”  
  
Chris nods—thank you, thank you for understanding, thank you for your wrist under my hand as I hold you down and feel your pulse sing—and swallows and yanks off his shirt and sweater in lieu of forming any attempt at verbal reply.  
  
Sebastian looks wholeheartedly delighted by the reveal. Chris can’t figure out why, and then realizes that winter-sky eyes’re fascinated by the tattoos. Oh. Right. He does have those. Might be interesting, his body, after all.  
  
“So many stories.” Thoroughly enchanted, Sebastian looks up at his face. “May I touch you?”  
  
Chris feels his eyebrows go up again, for a different reason. “You’re asking permission?” His cock’s immediately at rock-solid attention. “Yeah. Yes. Here.” He grabs that wrist, moves Sebastian’s hand. Assertion of authority. Sebastian moans softly, cock visibly impatient, pressing up through silky black boxer-briefs and unfastened jeans. He lets Chris guide his touch, and shivers with each reminder of control. Chris tells him the short versions of some of the stories: loyalty, tributes to his mother, to a long-lost friend, reminders of the importance of silence and balance and exploration of self. Sebastian licks his lips, skims writer’s fingertips across ink and skin, makes Chris’s body tingle everyplace.  
  
“So good,” Chris tells him, just to see what’ll happen, and squeezes his wrist. “Asking for what you want, listening to everything I say, wanting to be mine, and you are, aren’t you? Tell me.”  
  
“Yours,” Sebastian whispers. Eyelashes fluttering, mouth dreamy. “Yours, Chris, _te rog,_ please…”  
  
Chris kisses him hard. Lightning bursts across the sky, white-hot even through half-closed window-shades. Sebastian moans when Chris pulls back, lips wet and shining and swollen; Chris can’t wait, can’t not get a hand on him, and shoves down Sebastian’s jeans and fumbles that thick length into his hand. Sebastian’s wet all over, dripping with need, must’ve been so messy in his briefs as his cock kept leaking at every touch; fierce protective want sizzles down Chris’s spine. Sebastian needs him this much, needs Chris’s hands and caresses and love.  
  
He takes Sebastian’s hand and guides it to his own erection, heated flesh craving that contact. Sebastian whispers something in Romanian, and then, “so _big_ ,” sounding dazed, yearning, ecstatic. Chris’s heart swells up more: Sebastian thinks he’s impressive, and he’s going to take care of Sebastian, going to give him everything he needs, going to keep him blissful and quivering and so loved…  
  
Sebastian’s stroking him now, finding a rhythm, getting a grip along the shaft, gasping and losing that rhythm as Chris gets back to teasing him. Sebastian’s deliciously responsive, crying out, writhing, arching his back to shove his cock deeper into Chris’s hand. Chris plays with him, keeping him on the edge, going back to the lightest of touches; Sebastian falls apart, begging, pleading, sobbing Chris’s name. Chris wraps the hand around him and pumps, once, grip just the right side of too cruel; Sebastian breaks off mid-babble, head rolling across the pillows, body shuddering and surrendered to Chris’s mercy. His breathing’s uneven, shaken by desire.  
  
“Sebastian,” Chris whispers. Close, gazing down at him, stopping all motion for a second. “Sebastian? Come on, talk to me, still okay?”  
  
Sebastian opens both eyes. Blinks, tries to talk, fails, tries again. “So good—Chris, please—so _close_ —”  
  
Chris rubs a thumb over the head of his cock. Over the tip, where more wetness follows the pressure. “I know, baby. I know you are. And I’m taking care of you.”  
  
“Yes—yes, you are, _da_ , yes, Chris, oh, Chris, _please_ …” Sebastian gives up. Sobbing quietly: cock held firmly in Chris’s grasp, kept at the peak. Where Chris wants him, and he’s quiet now, acquiescent, lost in that comprehension.  
  
“So good,” Chris murmurs, kissing him. Sebastian kisses back, clumsy and unguarded and trusting. Chris’s body almost hurts with it: with this strange kind of heartbreaking pure love, this need to give Sebastian more and more, to string him out until he’s delirious with sensation and then cradle him close in the aftermath and keep him shielded forever from harm. Sebastian’s still breathing fast, cheeks wet, cock wet, mouth wet and pliant; Chris needs him like the crackle of elements out in the night, needs him like water and air and light. Chris needs him to breathe, and needs him to know beyond a doubt how much he’s loved.  
  
He goes back to lavishing attention on Sebastian’s poor tormented cock. Nudges his own into Sebastian’s palm. Sebastian tries to reciprocate, but can’t summon enough coordination; that’s fine, though, that’s perfect, that’s exactly how Chris wants him, and Chris can feel the tightness gathering in his balls and down his spine at the thought, and they need to finish soon because Sebastian’s fine for now but might not be much longer—  
  
He speeds up those strokes, rubs his thumb over the head once more, and whispers, “Come for me, baby, right now, let it go,” and Sebastian’s hips jerk upward and his head falls back and he’s coming, spilling across Chris’s hand and his own stomach and chest, orgasm that goes on and on in ecstatic soundless glory.  
  
Chris starts to say something else, more praise or endearments or adoration, but he’ll never know for sure because Sebastian’s fingers find his cock and close fumblingly around him, and oh—  
  
He comes without even getting his pants off, comes in a drawn-out wave of rolling bliss that whites out his mind and curls his toes. Lightning streaks through the world again, metaphorical or real, he can’t tell and doesn’t care; and he falls down atop Sebastian and gathers him close and says words, love and yes and you and so good and incredible, knowing he’s rambling, feeling Sebastian tremble through aftershocks against his chest.  
  
They stay that way for a long time, surrounded by the ceaseless muffling curtains of the unending rain.  
  
Sebastian’s docile and malleable in the aftermath, wanting to touch and be touched, wanting to cuddle close. Chris kisses him, pets him, grabs towels and cleans them both up, and peels off ruined clothing to toss into a sticky heap on the floor. Sebastian smiles when Chris gets water and holds it up for him; Sebastian cries a little, a while after that, secure in Chris’s arms. Chris doesn’t ask. He doesn’t need to. When Sebastian lifts his head, peace blossoming like bluebells behind those eyes, and whispers, “Chris—” they both know.   
  
The night drifts toward morning like flotsam salvaged from a wreck. The remains of what might’ve been—fright and drugs and dread—turned into life-rafts, finding dawn. Or so most of Chris thinks; there’s a hint of apprehension nagging at the back of his brain, an unarticulated claw in his heart. Sebastian’s awfully quiet, and his breathing never quite evens out, though he says he’s fine when asked. He seems to mean it. Chris isn’t as sure, but can’t pinpoint a specific aspect to fuss over. Tiredness is understandable, after all. Hell, _Chris_ is tired, in a magnificent awestruck incredulous sort of way, and he’s the healthy one.   
  
Physically healthy. Not counting the anxiety. Which, hey, maybe that’s all this is: himself making mountains out of too-quiet molehills.  
  
The rain doesn’t let up. The lights go off and on twice more. Chris frowns. “Sebastian?”  
  
“Hmm?” Sebastian doesn’t bother moving, lying lazily under Chris’s left leg and arm. “I wasn’t looking. Is it raining harder?”  
  
“I think someone pissed off a god of thunder. Were you asleep?”  
  
“Not exactly. You feel wonderful. But…I don’t know…”  
  
“But? There’s a but?” Chris props himself up on elbows. Scrutinizes Sebastian’s face. Rolls his eyes when Sebastian’s fingers tiptoe down to poke his ass, an obvious joke. “Yeah, thank you, did I mention I love your sense of humor? Why is this joke a thing, though? Tell me.”  
  
“I am.” Sebastian starts to lift a hand, but stops, gesture trailing off uncompleted. “I feel…you said I should tell you, and I want to. I don’t know what…it isn’t you, it’s not what we did, that was everything I’ve ever needed. I only noticed afterward.”  
  
“Headache?” He balances on one arm, uses the other to caress Sebastian’s face, to feel the warmth of him, the sweep of eyelashes when they drop and lift. “Worse?”  
  
“Not even that. I don’t _know_. Just…not right. Far away. More tired than I should be. The wrong kind of tired. Lethargic. Is that the right word? As if I can’t wake up properly, but everywhere.”  
  
“Um.” Chris sits up. Slides a hand under Sebastian’s back, bare skin meeting his hand. Sebastian doesn’t seem quite able to sit up on his own, relying on support. “Look at me? Focus? How many fingers?”  
  
“Two, and that’s a very rude gesture in some countries. Where’re you going?”  
  
“Nowhere.” He’s trying to reach discarded pants with his toes. Aha. Success.  
  
“You wanted your phone?”   
  
“Um…” He’d meant to look up those drug components. Side effects. Interactions with alcohol. Overdoses. Exertion and increased heart-rates and overworked sensory input. He’s trying, but the treacherously spotty cell reception’s gone out again, and there’s no wi-fi. “Never mind. Don’t worry. Don’t do anything. Just—stay still and let me call someone, okay?”  
  
“Call someone about me, you mean.” Sebastian sighs. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“No,” Chris says. “Talk to me.” Stay awake, stay conscious, look at me so I can try to figure out whether your pupils seem wrong or if that’s just the lighting… “I’m calling the front desk.”  
  
No answer. Multiple rings.   
  
“Sebastian?”  
  
“Still here.” Shivering, though. Chris lunges for blankets. Heaps quilted fluff and for good measure the spare pillows around him. One corner of Sebastian’s mouth quirks up. “It’s not that bad. I only told you because you said you wanted to know. And I wanted to try. Letting you know. Come here.”  
  
Chris bites his lip, sits down beside the blanket-fortress, takes Sebastian’s hand where it’s emerged from pillows to grip his. “Thanks.”  
  
“You and me,” Sebastian says. “Together. It’s a story.”  
  
“Your next book?”  
  
“Or yours. Romance, science fiction…unlikely meeting of strangers in a strange land…I have been wondering what to do next, now that the trilogy’s over…new projects…”  
  
“Science fiction _and_ romance?”  
  
“About a Martian, and the boy he falls in love with, and a road trip around the Earth. Discoveries. Brave new worlds for them both. With illustrations. If you’d like…an illustrated novel? Together?”  
  
“They could go camping. Still cold?—Here, I’ll…make you tea or coffee or—” He’s not really paying attention to the words, though the idea’s tickling the back of his head, fun and airy as soda-pop and deep as lonely souls wandering together, full of exhilaration and collaborative potential. Right at _this_ moment he needs something to do. Motion. Action. Making the world change for the better, making Sebastian’s world change for the better, _please_.   
  
He’s aware that he’s on the verge of panicking. He clings to the mini-bar and the tangible squat shape of the instant coffeemaker. He can do this for Sebastian.  
  
There’s no coffee left, but he’s not entirely sure about caffeine and drug interactions, anyway. He flips through the tea. Earl Grey. Hibiscus orange blossom. Blueberry vanilla. Easy choice.   
  
Hot water and steam and sugar because Sebastian likes sugar. Back into the other room, where blue eyes’ve slipped shut, where long legs’re tucked up small inside a cocoon of bedding. He touches what he’s pretty sure’s a shoulder, under a sheet-tendril. “Sebastian?”  
  
No answer. And maybe Sebastian’s just that tired, just that comfortable in the blanket-nest, maybe Sebastian’s a heavy sleeper, not like they’ve spent a night together, not like Chris knows anything about his sleeping habits.   
  
He tries again. Shaking that shoulder. Harder.  
  
Nothing.   
  
“Sebastian? Baby? Um, sweetheart, kid, all the nicknames you want?”  
  
Nothing, and Chris shoves the tea onto the nearest bedside table and dives into the hill of quilts and grips Sebastian’s arm, snaps fingers in front of his face, taps his immobile cheek. Sebastian’s head rolls with the tap, unresponsive. “Come on, come on—please, please no, Sebastian—”  
  
He says, “No, this isn’t funny, you can’t—I just went to make tea, I made you tea, you were just talking about books, you can’t be—stop it, stop it, please.”  
  
He says, “I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry,” and cracks a hand across that cheek: one abrupt slap, sharp enough to leave pinkness, enough to break his own heart.  
  
Sebastian makes a sound, at that. Indistinct. Not a word, barely a noise, a mumble. Chris, crying now, wetness on his face, pleads, “I’m so sorry, I know it hurts, I’m trying, please wake up, say it again, come on, whatever you just said—” and grabs the hotel phone. That’s hardwired; he can damn well call an ambulance even if his mobile phone’s useless.  
  
The storm bursts across the world like a riot: deafening, blinding, dazzling.  
  
The dial tone dies in his ear.   
  
The power goes out, and the lights in the hotel room cut to black.  
  
Chris’s next breath vanishes from his lungs.   
  
And Sebastian doesn’t move.


	6. we're gonna be all right for another night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which happy endings are reached.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No real warnings for this chapter, just fluff and love.
> 
> Random trivia: what Sebastian says about passing out and waking up and feeling like it was some sort of internal reset button, that's actually a quote I stole from Awesome Husband after the day he thought it was a good idea to give blood and not eat food. Sigh.
> 
> Thanks for reading, guys. *hugs you*

The dark’s not all-encompassing. Chris tells himself that. Chris tells himself to believe that. They’re going to be fine, they’ll get through this, he’ll get them through this. He’s got camping skills, he’s got first-aid skills, he can—he can—  
  
Unfamiliar shapes loom in towers of black. Not his hotel room. A dresser that might be a gaping chasm. A bed-corner that’s sharpening teeth for unwary travelers. The faintest outline of Sebastian’s face, white and still amid the grey.  
  
You and me, he thinks. Together. You said so.  
  
Okay. Together. Breathing. Sebastian thinks he can. So he can. For those blue eyes. He pulls distraught anguished pieces into functioning order. His phone’s next to his hand, and reception’s out, of course, but the battery’s fine, which means the flashlight works. The light’s icy and white and artificial, but it takes up arms against the darkness and wins back some space to maneuver.  
  
He finds Sebastian’s throat, the bared line of that graceful neck, and checks his pulse. It’s there: sluggish, slow, but there. He holds his palm over soft lips: Sebastian’s also breathing, and Chris has a momentary breakdown of gratitude and tears at that point, crumpling into Sebastian’s shoulder, clutching limp hands in his.  
  
He can’t cry for too long. Has to find the next step.  
  
They could leave the room. Sebastian’s got long legs and lovely muscle, but Chris could handle carrying him. Chris _would_. But he’s not sure that stumbling around an unknown hotel in the dark during an epic deluge is a good idea.  
  
He could leave and try to find help, but that’d mean leaving Sebastian. He can’t. He won’t. Same thing. The rain screeches past the windowpanes, driven by sadistic wind. No lights show through the hotel-room curtains. No illumination.  
  
He says, sitting on the bed where they’d so lately laughed and made love, “Please be all right,” and presses Sebastian’s lax hand to his mouth, to his face: needing to feel him, to breathe him, to fight grief with Sebastian beside him.  
  
He says, “Please wake up now,” knowing it won’t help. “I’ll be upset with you,” he says. “I seriously will be this time, for doing this, for leaving me, so fuckin’ angry, but you can wake up now, anytime you want.”  
  
He whispers, “No I’m not, I’m not angry with you, I won’t be, I swear, if you’ll just open your eyes.”  
  
Sebastian doesn’t stir. Chris’s phone battery loses two percent. The skies mourn in ugly purple-black and leaden sheets of rain.  
  
“You did tell me,” he says. “You told me this time, when you weren’t feeling—I know how brave that was. Or I guess I don’t, I don’t know all your stories, but I want to. I’ll be here for you and you’ll be here for me, sound good?” and then he hears how much that sounds like bargaining, like one of those steps toward inevitable morbid acceptance, and he has to look away, out of the light.  
  
He thinks of something. Finds the now-cool tea by the glimmer of his phone. Uses a fingertip: drops of sweetness, of liquid, across Sebastian’s lips, into his mouth. “Blueberry,” he points out. “Extra sugar.”  
  
When he picks up his phone, he catches sight of the time. Can’t be right. Barely five minutes. How can that be an eternity?  
  
He leans in to press a kiss to Sebastian’s lips. They’re chilly and taste like tea and salt, though the latter’s Chris’s own fault.  
  
He doesn’t expect the kiss to work. This isn’t a fairytale. Sebastian’s not bespelled or cursed, and Chris is no dragon-slaying knight in armor. Only human, flattened under the fragments of the night.  
  
He just wants Sebastian to know he’s here. A promise.  
  
“You said it,” he tells closed eyes. “At dinner. You said it first, and I don’t know if you meant it, I don’t know if you meant to say it, but just so you know, I was _thinking_ it first.”  
  
Was that a sound? A sigh? A reaction? He waits, heart climbing into his throat, but it doesn’t come again.  
  
“You said you love me,” he says. “Which, yeah, it’s been like two days, and I love you too, I think I always have, some kind of you-shaped space just waiting for us to meet, and okay, that sounded _way_ less weird and creepy in my head, but you know what I mean. I love you. So, y’know, you’re not the only one who can say it out loud.”  
  
Movement? Eyelashes flickering? Shadows?  
  
“You said we were a story,” he murmurs, and Sebastian’s eyelashes flutter a second time, and Chris starts crying so hard that he can’t answer when that wonderful voice breathes his name, bewildered.  
  
“Chris,” Sebastian asks again, and tries to reach for him with the hand Chris isn’t clutching, though he’s thwarted by overjoyed blankets. “What…are you…you’re crying…”  
  
“Of course I’m fucking crying,” Chris retorts, “you fucking _idiot_ , I thought you were going to _die_ , I love you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for swearing at you, I love you,” and kisses him, but gently, carefully, worshipfully, drowned in tears.  
  
“I feel,” Sebastian says a few minutes later, after he’s been propped up by pillows and tea and Chris’s arms, “like I’ve been asleep for a hundred years. And missed the most important part of the story. Did I hear you say—did you say, when I woke up, or did I imagine…”  
  
“I love you,” Chris fills in. “I love you.” He can’t say it enough. Has to say it as many times as possible in all the time to come. The power’s not back on yet, but they’ve got his phone and Sebastian’s, spilling joint electronic incandescence over joined hands and shared touches and traded kisses. “Just rest. Please.”  
  
“I’m entirely up to talking.” Sebastian mock-scowls at him. Head on Chris’s shoulder. “In fact I feel oddly better. As if everything just gave up and shut down for a while and hit some sort of terrifying reset button. I’m sorry for scaring you. I love you.”  
  
“That is the worst analogy you could ever—” Chris begins, because they’re both writers and so a critique of metaphors at the brink of death will signal a return to ordinariness, and even more because in fact it’s a usefully descriptive turn of phrase but he’s too lingeringly afraid to admit as much; and then he says, “…you what?”  
  
“I love you,” Sebastian says, eyes serious and elated and relieved and definite, that rare elusive watercolor hue that Chris’s never known anyplace else: flower-petals and topaz and layer upon layer of pale blue. “ _Te iubesc._ I love you. I meant it when I said it at dinner. Though I wish I’d been more romantic about saying it, considering it was the first time—”  
  
“I fucking love you,” Chris says, and kisses him.  
  
This kiss goes on for several seconds. The bedside lamps stutter, kindle gold, flare back into life. Power restored. Energy pouring into bedraggled sheets and tranquil walls and that stalwart dresser. Sebastian laughs into the kiss, catches breath, nods without hesitation when Chris demands to know he’s okay.  
  
“I’m still taking you to the hospital,” Chris decrees. Statement of fact. Unassailable. “As soon as you feel like getting up.”  
  
“You’ll be there with me.”  
  
“Right there.” One more kiss. “With you.”  
  
“Like our Martian and his human,” Sebastian agrees. “A love story.” Chris’s heart skips a beat—when were there _Martians_ , oh God, hallucinations, delirium— and then remembers and _then_ does jubilant emotional acrobatics. “You were awake for that?”  
  
“I’m in if you are,” Sebastian says, twining fingers through Chris’s, smiling at him in the night.  
  
They’re both in, of course. For forever.  
  
They do end up at the local hospital, where a white-faced Margarita comes running through double doors to throw arms around Sebastian and then around Chris, who hugs her back. The physician on duty gives Sebastian stern-faced lectures about the dangers of overdoses and the importance of following dosage guidelines, and simultaneously switches his headache-related painkillers to something less inclined to interfere with his ability to breathe, plus some gratifyingly colorful insults to whoever wrote out an initial prescription with _those_ side effects for someone recovering from a respiratory illness. Sebastian, being Sebastian, tries to apologize. Chris says, “Do you think Captain America would want to punch your original doctors in the face, or in the stomach, over this? I mean, if it were Bucky.” Sebastian’s surprised enough to stop assuming the whole disaster’s his own fault, which is exactly Chris’s goal, so that works out.  
  
The train-tracks become gradually cleared of mudslides and floods as the storm passes, as the rain dries up, as flowers bloom from saturated ground. Chris moves into Sebastian’s hotel suite; they wake up entangled in each other, safe and sound, and on the morning of the fifth day Chris opens his eyes to find Sebastian smiling at him, and promptly says, “You know I’m not letting you finish your book tour alone.”  
  
“I like waking up with you,” Sebastian whispers back, “every day.”  
  
They get on the train together. Chris sends postcards and text messages home: to Scott, to his mother, to friends. Scott texts back a message that contains only exclamation points, followed by _I CAN’T EVEN FUCKING BELIEVE YOU’RE BANGING SEBASTIAN STAN NO I REFUSE THIS IS SO UNFAIR YOU’RE MY BROTHER AT LEAST TELL ME ONE DETAIL._ Chris is still working on a reply when Sebastian takes his phone, sticks his tongue in Chris’s ear, snaps the picture, and hits send.

They drop by the convenience store to say hi before going. Jeremy’s eyes practically fall out of his head. Sebastian offers to take a selfie with him. Jeremy drops his phone on his own foot, and looks about ready to pass out when Sebastian picks it up and hands it back.

They sign books—Margarita makes some calls, and a box with Chris’s name on it turns up mysteriously at the next stop, and people _buy_ the contents—in New Orleans and Austin and Denver. They watch grain-fields ripple by through train-windows and scribble drafted scenes for chapters of that science-fiction travelogue-epic-gay-romance (“no, they’d _completely_ stop at the giant ball of twine,” Sebastian asserts, eyes dancing, “you can’t tell me that wouldn’t be the greatest welcome-to-Earth moment _ever_ , which one of us had the coming-to-America immigrant experience, trust me on this,” and Chris says, “okay, what about diner food?”) and hold hands under Midwest stars. Sebastian’s cough goes away for good and the headaches get better and he stops bothering with the prescription painkillers except for one or two very crowded publicity-stuffed days that tax his recovering strength. Chris holds him at night, and breathes in the scent of his hair, and wonders anew at how lucky he himself is, and says thank you, in his heart.  
  
In Utah Chris buys a tent big enough for two and teaches Sebastian how to make s’mores, surrounded by towering red rocks and the freewheeling dome of the sky. Sebastian licks chocolate and marshmallow from long fingers and gets graham-cracker crumbs in his shirt and tastes like laughter when Chris tackles him into their sleeping bag.  
  
Writing with Sebastian is—easy. Fluid. Like nothing Chris has felt before: words race out of them both, ideas upon ideas, prose building itself into dancing cathedrals. Sparks on a page, sparks in bed, sparks when he holds Sebastian’s hand. He thinks that feeling might never go away. He thinks he could want this every single day.  
  
In Los Angeles they walk along a beach, carrying shoes, getting rolled-up pant-legs wet in the surf. The air tingles with salt and sunshine, gold and blue and white, made of palm trees and boundless horizons and California dreams. Their shoulders bump as they walk through sand, companionably sharing space; Chris slides his hand to the back of Sebastian’s neck after the third time, drawing him in for a kiss. Sebastian tips his face up: earnest and devout, belonging to Chris by choice, with sand between their toes.  
  
“I love you,” Chris says, Chris tells him, hand stroking the fine hairs at the nape of his neck, thumb rubbing over skin, deliberate in the way they both enjoy.  
  
“I love you,” Sebastian says right back. “I like it here. The ocean. The sound of waves.”  
  
“You like Southern California?” He’ll buy a house on the beach if it’ll make blue eyes smile. Ten houses. “I could learn to cook. Mexican food.”  
  
“By all means, but not what I was thinking.” Sebastian grins. “I do also love New York. I’d never want to move, but maybe vacations…if we need to be in Hollywood in any case…”  
  
“Um,” Chris says. His family’s in Boston. His family’s got _roots_. He cheers for the Patriots and drinks Sam Adams beer. He’ll stick by the mental vow about beach houses, but a lot of homesickness might be involved. “Hollywood?”  
  
“Yes, I meant to tell you, the producers of the Captain America films called…inquiring about rights for any upcoming properties, considering what a lucrative asset I am…I may have mentioned your name. Our project. It’s only a thought. We’re not even done writing. I said as much.”  
  
“Our project.” The waves bend and break against the shore. Booming, cyclical, resonant. “It could be a movie?”  
  
“There’s interest, at least. No promises.”  
  
“You’re doing all the talking to studio heads, kid.”  
  
“Yes, Chris.”  
  
“What else?” He knows that voice, those expressions, better than he knows his own, these days. Sebastian’s not bothered about the studio negotiations—Chris’s anxiety makes meetings with authority figures a special kind of hell, but they can handle that hell if Sebastian does most of the discussion, and Sebastian’s excellent at making everybody fall in love with him, winsome and likeable and eager to please and so charmingly genuine that producers and publishers tend to give him anything he wants, a fact which some of them may have cause to regret. There’s something under the surface, though. He can tell. “Tell me what you were thinking. I mean, I’d like it if you told me. I mean please?”  
  
“Yes, Chris…oh, no, I mean it, I am saying yes, I brought it up, I want to tell you. Or ask you. I didn’t have _words_ yet. About places. Where we go after this, if we go…home.”  
  
“Home.” Sebastian will want him to come to New York, then. City streets and neon glare and noisy lively neighborhoods packed with bodies. A sky he won’t be able to see.  
  
There’ll be good times. Stillness and calm at unlikely moments. Autumn leaves in Central Park, the scent of coffee on sleepy mornings, museums bubbling over with history and art, a kaleidoscope of humanity. Sebastian in his arms at night. Safe harbor, and the stories they’ve yet to tell.  
  
“About that. I wanted to ask. If you—”  
  
“Of course I’ll come with—”  
  
“We could write in New York,” Sebastian says, tentative in a way he rarely is these days, tentative but not looking away, “half the time, and in Boston half the time, and…see what happens? Where this goes? It’s an idea. I just thought. If you wanted to. Think about it.”  
  
“…home,” Chris repeats. The ocean runs in to tickle his toes, frothy and euphoric. He’s leaning in, nudging Sebastian’s nose with his. “Where we go. Together.”  
  
“Yes?”  
  
“I love you,” Chris says once more, thinking about Hollywood adaptations and fame he never could’ve pictured for himself, thinking about the exuberant crash of waves and the warmth of Sebastian’s sunlit skin under his hand, thinking about stories and futures and the far-off misty shape of wedding-rings, pure and true. “Yes.”


End file.
